


Tributes

by taispeantas_laethuil



Series: Ever In Your Favor [1]
Category: Dragon Age: Inquisition, Hunger Games Series - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hunger Games Setting, Angst, M/M, Slow Burn
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-28
Packaged: 2018-08-29 06:56:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 12
Words: 34,885
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8479555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taispeantas_laethuil/pseuds/taispeantas_laethuil
Summary: In which Dorian (of District Three) and the Bull (of District Seven) meet as tributes in the arena of the 68th Hunger Games.





	1. Day Five

**Author's Note:**

> With many thanks to [Iambic](http://archiveofourown.org/users/Iambic/pseuds/Iambic) for the beta and also listening to me yell about this.

The Career Pack was right on his heels, but if he was lucky they didn’t know that. The Gamemakers had caused another total eclipse: no sun, no moon, no stars. Just pitch black, and a rustling skittering noise from whatever fucked up monsters the Capitol wanted to see tear them to shreds.

Good news: with all that skittering the Careers probably didn’t know where he was.

Bad news: all that skittering was getting _really close_.

The Bull headed in the direction of the forest, or as close as he could guess. He pressed on until the nauseating rub of grass against grass gave way to the familiar rustle of leaves in his ears and the uneven ground of knotted roots beneath his feet.

The skittering stopped. The Bull was so relieved that he couldn’t even be mad when he walked face first into a branch. He just smiled, and kept his grip on his axe slack.

It was such a freaking greenhorn mistake. _Everyone_ knew, down to the smallest imekari too young to work, that the forest only went quiet when there was trouble. Everyone except for the Bull on the fifth day of the Games, that was. He was taken by surprise when there was a sudden screech and a flash of light behind him.

He spun around, hefting his axe as he did so, squinting in the sudden brightness. He could, just barely, make out the shape of something through the overwhelming glare, something elongated and somehow both skeletal and boneless all at the same time. It was in an almost human shape, with two arms, two legs, and a faceless head that was somehow emitting an unearthly shriek. As the Bull’s vision cleared he could see that it looked like it was covered in green lichen where it wasn’t on fire.

He thought, even as he swung his axe right for where the thing’s eyes should be, that being on fire hadn’t been its call.

His first swing missed, and he had to leap back to avoid a counterattack, a swipe with long spindle-sharp fingers. The monster let out another shriek and then started to convulse. The Bull’s second swing hit true, and the thing fell out of its misery in the center of the little clearing they were in.

It probably wouldn’t start a forest fire. That was one less problem to worry about, when he could hear more skittering from just outside his field of vision, along with the occasional hiss.

He also didn’t know _why_ the thing had caught on fire. He looked around the clearing, searching for anything that might be a cause. On his second pass he found it: there, perched just below the understory, was the boy from District Three.

He looked up at the boy. The boy looked back down at him.

Then he cleared his throat, and spoke. “They don’t appear able to climb. Those- whatever they are. They can jump a bit, but not high enough to penetrate the lowest canopy.”

He’d had the Bull at _they can’t climb_. He was already clambering up the trunk of nearest tree when it occurred to him that maybe he shouldn’t take the advice of someone who could throw fire at him, or something like that.

The skittering and hissing stopped abruptly, and the Bull heard the not distant enough shouts of the Career Pack. He climbed faster. If he was lucky, then they would assume that he ran from the fire rather than sticking around. He cleared the understory, and kept climbing until the Careers were close enough for him to hear their voices.

“I’m telling you, I saw the District Seven boy.”

“Well, he’s not here now.”

That was the District Two boy, Samson, and the District One girl, Calpernia. He remembered her- not conventionally pretty, like most of the District One Careers, but she’d gotten an _eleven_ on her assessment.

He sat still and waited, one hand on his axe. He hoped the District Three boy didn’t do anything stupid.

“I’m telling you, he was here, I saw the horns!”

“What does it matter if he was here?” That was the boy from District Four. Culling? No, _Cullen_. “He’s not now.”

“He could be hiding,” insisted Sam-whatever. “He could be planning an ambush!”

“Then perhaps we should move away from the light before we ruin our night vision,” suggested the District One boy. Marius, that was his name- the guy District One had sent to make sure that Calpernia made it, even if the talking heads thought it was the other way around.

That was it for the Careers. He’d injured the District Two girl in the bloodbath, and from what he could tell she hadn’t been allowed into the Career Pack. She was still alive, but the Bull didn’t know where she was or what she was doing. The District Four girl was dead, along with the girl from District Three, as of the second day.

“Wait,” Calpernia said before they could move away. “We should make torches before we go. Spread out, and look out for traps. We don’t know where the Three boy is, and I don’t want another repeat of yesterday.”

The Bull waited, barely daring to breathe, as the Careers stumbled around the forest floor, gathering wood for torches. He knew they couldn’t see him- whatever weird purple and gold trees these were, they weren’t crown shy, the leaves of the understory pressed together so tightly that hardly any light came through- but he still worried. One wrong move, one suspicious sound, and they might come looking. Or worse, they might decide to torch the trees, not knowing how quickly a forest fire could spread. They’d kill them all, and it wouldn’t be a pretty death.

The Bull would know. He still had nightmares about the time the group home went up.

He listened as the Careers lit their torches, kicked dirt over the still-flaming corpse of the monster, and moved on once that fire had been extinguished, taking what little light there was with them.

The Bull looked around in vain, trying to figure out where the District Three boy was.

“Behind you,” the boy said quietly.

The Bull jumped a bit.

“Hang on, I’ll come to you.”

There was a little bit of rustling, and once the sound of a branch snapping and a quiet curse. Then the Bull felt the branch he was on dip slightly as the other boy clambering on it.

“Hold still,” he whispered. “I think I can- yes.”

The extra weight left the Bull’s branch, and he heard something settle on the branch in front of him.

“Can you see?” the Bull asked.

“I have night vision goggles,” the boy explained. “Two pairs actually. I’ll trade you the spare if you have any food.”

“I have some pawpaws in my pack from yesterday. They might be a little bruised, but they should still be edible. I’ll give you eight for the goggles.”

“How big are they?” the boy asked. The words almost drowned out how his stomach growled at the mention of fruit.

“About half a palm for me, a full palm for you.”

There was a pause, and then the sound of a zipper coming undone.

“Deal,” he said.

The goggles were dropped into his lap. He had to fumble them on one-handed- which took a while, because of the horns- with his legs tightly clamped on his branch and his axe ready, just in case. It took a minute, but at the end of it he could see the boy from Three, one hand on a tiny little pocket knife, the other clutching at the tree. His pack was opened slightly, hanging from another branch and within easy reach.

“Well?” he said, lifting his chin a little.

The Bull opened his pack, and pulled out the pawpaws one at a time. The other boy took them and deposited them into his pack, except for the eighth one, which he inspected.

“Do I just bite into them, or-?”

“Normally I would slice them in half and then eat it with a spoon,” the Bull replied.

“Lovely,” the other boy said, rolling his eyes. He cut it down the middle, balanced one half on his lap, and cradled the other in his left hand, letting go of the tree with his right to scoop out the flesh.

“Don’t eat the seeds,” the Bull told him. “They’re toxic.”

The boy nodded, and began to eat. The Bull watched and tried to remember what he knew about him.

He tried not to learn the names of anyone who wasn’t a Career. Otherwise, it might be difficult to kill them, if it came down to it- the Careers, he was pretty sure, wouldn’t give him any space to hesitate. So he didn’t know the boy’s name.

He knew that he’d gotten an eight on the assessment. He knew that his mentor had played up the sex appeal for his interview, dressing him up in tight-fitting black with a gold sash around his waist and golden jewelry and makeup. The Bull knew he’d come across as cocky in his interview, and had seemed very sure that he was smarter than all the other Tributes.

He knew that he’d volunteered, like the Bull had.

Vasaad was always starting fights he couldn’t finish- he wouldn’t have lasted even this long. He probably would have tried to take out the Careers on the first day and gotten killed in the bloodbath. The Bull couldn’t let that happen. The guy the boy from Three had volunteered for was a sickly-looking fourteen year old, who looked like he was having trouble walking. Dorian hadn’t even let him get to the stage before volunteering to take his place.

The Bull kind of respected that. He kind of really didn’t want to kill this kid.

That was kind of a useless emotion to have.

“So,” said the boy from District Three. “You’re Buffalo, or something like that?”

“The Bull,” he corrected. “The article is important.”

“I’m Dorian, in case you’ve forgotten,” he replied. The Bull kind of wished he hadn’t said that. “Dorian Pavus.”

The surname rang a bell at that moment that it hadn’t before. “Pavus like, the Pavus lumber skidder?” he asked.

Dorian let out a little huff that was probably supposed to be a laugh. “Yes. An invention of some ancestor of mine. Another one from my mother’s side of the family invented the weather proofing on your trousers- she’s a Thalrassian.”

“Shit, really?” the Bull asked.

Dorian nodded.

“I’ve been pronouncing that wrong my entire life.”

Dorian actually laughed at that, pressing the back of his hand against his mouth to muffle the noise.

 _Oh no_ , the Bull thought. He shouldn’t be doing this. He should-

The eclipse ended as suddenly as it had begun, the return of the sun blinding with the goggles. The Bull yelped, squeezing his eyes shut as he pulled them off his face to hang around his neck. Across from him, Dorian let out a shout in whatever dialect District Three wasn’t supposed to have but did anyway as he did the same.

“And that’s the downside,” Dorian said, rubbing at his eyes.

“A really shitty downside,” the Bull grumbled, trying to blink away the spots in front of his eyes.

They sat there, rubbing their eyes as their vision returned for several minutes. Then the just sat there and looked at one another.

“You know,” Dorian said slowly. “We would probably make a less tempting target to the Careers if we stuck together.”

“You’re proposing an alliance?” the Bull asked.

“Just until the Careers are dead,” Dorian said.

It was a pretty optimistic thing to say.  It was far more likely that the Careers would kill them, even if they were together.

But Dorian had already saved his ass once, and from the look of things he really didn’t know how to feed himself. They could be good for one another.

They certainly couldn’t have worse luck together than they did apart.

“Deal,” the Bull said, sticking out his hand.

Dorian shook it with a smile. “Until the Careers are out of play, then.”

 

* * *

 

The sun was setting, so they booked it out of the forest. Once the first moon had risen the tree’s flowers would open and release some kind of terrible poisonous pollen that would cause hallucinations, seizures, and eventually coughing up blood as your internal organs started to dissolve.

The girl from District Eleven would have gone that way yesterday, if the Bull hadn’t put her out of her misery once he realized why her chest was bloating like that. Her partner hadn’t understood- or maybe he’d gotten a smaller dosage of the poison and had seen something else entirely. He’d attacked the Bull with a sword, and the Bull had had to kill him too.

Dorian shrugged when the Bull told him this. “I just figured that the pollen was bad and ran for it.”

No reaction to the fact that he’d killed two kids- two fucking fourteen year old kids. He kind of wished he would react, would spit or call him a monster. He kind of wished this wasn’t something that was treated as just something that happened, or worse, as something to be proud of.

The Bull didn’t reply and they fell into an uneasy silence.

They cleared the forest before sunset, and set out through the grass. There was some kind of bird song that went up as the moons rose, a sweet innocent sounding song the Bull didn’t trust one bit.

“If we can make it to those rocks before they start hunting, I won’t have to use any of my remaining grenades,” Dorian said.

“How many do you have?” the Bull asked.

“Three.”

If he hadn’t used one of them to save the Bull he’d have four. That was something to think about- or maybe to never think about again.

“Any idea what they are?”

“They’re big, they fly, and I harbor the terrible suspicion that they would very much like to feed us to their young,” Dorian said. “I’m afraid muttations were never any particular specialty of mine.”

They made it to the outcropping of rocks after the anthem had played, just as a large, birdlike silhouette passed in front of the moon.

“ _Vashedan_ ,” the Bull swore. Dorian ignored both him and the monster, and scrambled up on the rocks. After a moment of tracking the thing’s movements the Bull followed, hauling himself up the rocks to find Dorian, lifting the edge off of a piece of sod and holding his goggles to his face as he peered down.

“What are you waiting for?” the Bull asked, fully prepared to jump down without him.

“I have to check for spiders.”

The Bull stared at him. The bird’s siren call was growing louder.

“You’re worried about spiders _now_?” he asked.

“The spiders in question are roughly the size of a puma,” Dorian told him. He tossed a rock down into the hole, and immediately reared back. “Nope, next hole,” he said, dropping the sod back down.

They scrambled over to the next piece of sod. Dorian lifted it, and the Bull tossed a rock down straight away before putting the goggles back on. He couldn’t see much of anything down there. Apparently neither could Dorian, because he dropped down after a minute.

The Bull followed. The hidey-hole was shallow, and his horns got caught in the sod.

“Crouch down, you idiot,” Dorian snarled, pulling on his hand. The Bull went to his knees in a shower of dirt.

“To the side,” Dorian urged him impatiently. “Come on, to the side!”

The hidey hole was a lot wider than it was deep, and there was something of an overhang that the Bull could almost fit under. Above them, the song turned into an earsplitting screech.

He’d heard that noise before, had wondered what made it. Now he knew, and kind of wished he didn’t.

The screech ended in a loud thump, and the scrabbling of talon on stone. There was a clicking sort of noise, a crunch, and another screech, and then the thing took off again, beak too full to make any more noise.

“Well,” Dorian said from where he was huddled up behind the Bull’s head. “With luck, that took care of the spider.”

“Will there be others?” the Bull asked.

“I don’t think so,” Dorian said. “I mean, I’ve seen more than one of them, but they hunt alone, and seem to have territories.”

“Good to know,” the Bull replied, but he didn’t move until Dorian started pushing at him.

“Unless you want me to take a piss on your hair,” he muttered, so the Bull unwedged himself from the overhang, and watched as Dorian lifted the sod, poked his head out, and then heaved himself up out of the hidey hole.

It took a couple of minutes for him to return. The Bull hardly moved in all that time.

“There’s a good spot just off to the left, if you need to go,” Dorian said when he returned. “There’s a bit of an overhang to hide under.”

“No thanks,” the Bull said. “I’m good.”

Dorian shrugged. “Suit yourself.”

He hunkered down, pulling up his hood and pulling his sleeves down over his hands. He lay down with his head on his pack and drew his knees up beneath the hem of his jacket. It was time for bed, apparently.

The Bull shrugged, and detached the sleeping back from his pack. He settled down to sleep, his axe close at hand.

Dorian was shivering, and the night was only going to get colder. Especially since they were surrounded by stone.

“I’ve got a sleeping bag,” the Bull said.

“I noticed,” Dorian replied shortly.

“I mean- we could share, if you like.”

Dorian peered up at him from beneath his hood. “No thanks,” he said.

The Bull shrugged, and dozed off. He woke up maybe an hour later, his face noticeably chilled and Dorian’s teeth chattering.

He listened to the noise for a few moments before he made a decision. He sat up and started unzipping his jacket.

“What are you doing?” Dorian asked, gritting his teeth to stop the words from stammering out.

“I can’t sleep with you making all that noise,” the Bull said.

Dorian opened his mouth to retaliate, and the Bull threw his jacket at his face.

“What?” Dorian asked, flailing a little to clear the jacket from his face. “What- why did you?”

“Just zip yourself into that if you won’t share the sleeping bag, okay?” The Bull hunkered back down into his sleeping bag- he’d be okay without the jacket, but that didn’t mean he wanted to be out in his shirt in this weather.

He pulled the sleeping bag up around his shoulders. Across from him, Dorian looked down at the jacket, before good sense won out over his pride. The jacket probably would have come down below his knees if he were wearing it normally; as it was, it was kind of a sleep bag all its own.

Dorian’s teeth stopped chattering. The Bull went back to sleep.


	2. Day Six

The Bull dreamed.

He tried not to. Tama had been trying to teach him some of the old ways, including how to not waste your energy on dreams, but he wasn’t very good at it.

So, he dreamed. He dreamed of winter, the famine season, of digging the phloem out of trees while the Peacekeepers hid from the cold in their guard stations, burrowing tubers and bulbs out from under the snow and frozen earth, working until his hands were chapped and bloody and the sun was cresting over the horizon. He ran back to the home, food- or what was near enough to pass for it, anyway- clutched to his chest. It seemed to take forever.

Everyone had been alive, when he left. They were dead now, bodies shrouded as Tama stood vigil over them, twenty-three little corpses all lined up, twelve girls and eleven boys.

“Why did you go so far, Ashkaari?” she said. She wasn’t crying; her voice was as flat and dead as everything else in the room. “You didn’t have to go to the Capitol. You could have stayed and helped.”

“I had to save Vasaad!” the Bull protested, shocked.

“I rely on you, Ashkaari. We all rely on you. And you left us.”

“But-but-” This didn’t make any sense, this wasn’t how it was supposed to happen. “But I came back. I brought food!”

He showed her his haul, which was famine food no longer: now it was tessarae grain and oil and tinned food he could just barely remember from back when Sten had won the Games a good ten years before. It spilled from his hands and onto the floor and kept spilling somehow, filling the room up to the beds, and then beyond, burying the bodies.

The Bull waded to the door, but it wouldn’t open.

“Don’t worry Ashkaari,” Tama said, her voice just as calm and lifeless as it had been before. “Just accept it. It’ll all be over soon.”

Grain and oil filled his mouth; tins of food pressed against him from all sides, and crushed and-

He woke up.

It was the morning. Light shone through the sod from the holes his horns had poked through last night, and he could hear birdsong- regular bird song, not the hunting song of the bird mutt from the night before. There was just enough light now, coming in from the holes for him to make out Dorian’s face. He looked tired, even in sleep- small wonder, if he’d been sleeping on the rocks without so much as a blanket.

He could do it now. Only one of them would ever be able to go home- if he did it now, it would be quick. Dorian wouldn’t see it coming, wouldn’t even feel it, probably. He would be warm, and have some food in him. It was probably the kindest way to do it.

He couldn’t- there wasn’t-

There was a loud, sudden honk from just outside. It startled Dorian awake and started the Bull out of his thoughts.

“Frigging weird-ass albino wapiti,” the Bull grumbled.

“Is that what they are?” Dorian asked, looking startled.

“That’s what they look like to me,” the Bull told him with a shrug.

Dorian wriggled around a bit, pushing his hands back through his sleeves and then pulled the Bulls jacket off over his head. He wadded it up and tossed it back to the Bull, who caught it and put it back on.

“There’s a place to piss off to the side, you said?”

“Supposing you don’t want to just whip it out and piss on the backs of the wabitty or whatever they’re called. How do you even know that, anyway? Isn’t it all trees, trees, the town hall area for the Reaping, more trees and the occasional lumber yard and paper mill in Seven?”

“Well, there’s a lot of wildlife that lives in those trees,” the Bull replied as he rolled up his sleeping bag. “Why, is it really all factories and labs in Three?”

“We also do a very nice line of concrete apartments,” Dorian replied, slinging his pack over his shoulder and pushing the flap of sod away. He hauled himself out of the hidey-hole before continuing. “There’s not really a whole lot of wildlife in Three, beyond lab animals from testing and the usual vermin to feed off of waste. There a few gardens, and window boxes. One of the victors took up zoo keeping after she won, I used to visit there a lot before I was apprenticed. Sometimes people try to keep chickens or pheasants or quails or whatever in coops on their roofs, but that’s illegal.”

So was the gathering that most of Seven did to get by, but even the Peacekeepers turned a blind eye to that most of the time, or at worst, skimmed some off the top. From the sound of Dorian’s voice, that wasn’t the case with the coops in Three.

He probably shouldn’t mention that for the cameras, though.

“So, this is all new to you then?” he asked, slinging on his own pack and following Dorian up.

The sky was a bright, uniform grey, and a fine mist was rising up from the river and from the snouts of the wapiti. Wherever there wasn’t the white fur and antlers of the creatures, there was the bright pink of the grass, and off in the distance there was the purple-and-gold forest.

The rocks were blue. Go figure.

“This is more nature than most people from Three see in their entire lives,” Dorian agreed. “And it’s not even real nature.”

“Yeah, real nature is less trippy.”

“Like… you don’t have to take a trip to see it?” Dorian asked.

“Like… uh… well the colors aren’t…” The Bull wasn’t sure he should really be explaining the special mushrooms on TV to people in the Capitol. He looked skyward, but that didn’t provide any answers. “Okay, so there’s this fungus that grows in Seven. Sometimes somebody makes a mistake and it ends up in the stew and you don’t notice until things start looking weird. Colors go off, and then start making noise…”

“Oh! Psychotropics!” Dorian said, his expression clearing. “Yes, the chemistry borough makes those, I think.”

“Makes them?” the Bull asked. “What for?”

“Well, that pollen has to come from somewhere, I suppose.”

Fair point. The Bull dropped down to the little overhang Dorian had spoken of earlier to piss. The wapiti gave him a wide berth, which was nice. Getting crushed by a herbivore would be kind of embarrassing, now that he had managed to survive nearly an entire week here.

The Bull climbed back onto the rocks and found Dorian crouching over his open pack, inspecting one of the pawpaws.

“Are they meant to be so squishy?” he asked.

“Pawpaws ripen quickly,” the Bull explained. “That one’s on its last legs, but it should still be good to eat.”

“Excellent,” Dorian muttered under his breath.  He dug through his pack, sorting through the fruit. The Bull sat down and started his own breakfast while Dorian hemmed and hawed over the things.

“They grow in a grove not far from here,” the Bull told him. “I’ll show you. It’s actual nature and everything.”

“Oh, really?” Dorian said, looking pleased. “Thank you.”

He ate the two squishiest pawpaws the Bull had given him, putting the rest back into his pack for later. By the time he’d finished the wapiti had forded the river and gone to graze on the other side, and they set off for the pawpaw grove together.

 

* * *

Nothing much happened that day, not by Hunger Games standards, at least. The Career Pack must be doing something interesting, or maybe some of the other tributes. The bloodbath had been light, this year, only seven deaths, and in the five days since there had been just four more; more than half of them were still alive, and apparently that was enough to allow him and Dorian a quiet day.

He brought Dorian over to the little pawpaw grove, just across from the shallow ford. It took them close to the forest, but so long as they weren’t there after moonrise, they should be safe enough. The Bull showed him how to judge which fruits were ripe, and which were close enough to it that they would continue to ripe in his pack over the next couple of days. Then Dorian showed him a little patch of chicory he’d found earlier, but had passed by.

“I just thought- since being brightly colored was normally a sign of being poisonous, but  _ everything _ in the arena is brightly colored, that these normal-seeming plants were poisonous as a sort of counterbalance,” Dorian explained, looking embarrassed.

“That’s not bad logic,” the Bull assured him.

“I hadn’t eaten in three days,” Dorian exclaimed, like that was really a lot.

He supposed it might be, for Dorian. Three was supposed to be one of the wealthier districts, wasn’t it? Not as wealthy as One or Two, and certainly not as wealthy as the Capitol, but a whole lot wealthier than Seven.

They picked enough chicory to stuff their packs with, and then set off for the river again to clean them off.

“You don’t have, like, a pot or a skillet or something, do you?” the Bull asked as he chopped off the leafy greens and tossed them into the river, so they were less likely to leave behind any trace of their presence for the careers to find. Dorian had already put a leafy branch to scratch out their footprints off to the side, and refilled his water jug and set it to purify with iodine.

Dorian shook his head, not looking up from the chicory root he was scrubbing.

“It’s a pity. If you grind these up and roast them, they make a nice hot drink,” the Bull told him. They were pretty bitter uncooked, and didn’t have much taste to them, but they would keep longer than the pawpaws, and it was better than starving, if it came down to it.

“We couldn’t risk the fire anyway,” Dorian pointed out.

“It’s still a pity,” the Bull said.

At that moment, all light in the arena was snuffed out.

“ _ As-eb vashe-qalab _ !” the Bull swore, fumbling for his pack by touch before he remembered the goggles. He pulled them up and blinked as the world came back into weird green-lit relief.

Dorian was way ahead of him, sweeping the water jug up into his pack and scrambling up the bank.

“Bull, we do  _ not _ want to be by the river,” he said sharply, once he realized that the Bull wasn’t panicking along with him.

“Okay, I’m coming!” the Bull said, getting to his feet and hurrying to catch up with him. “The forest is that way. Do you think-”

There was a sudden flash of blinding light on the periphery of his vision. The Careers were on the opposite side of the river, and they still had torches.

He grabbed Dorian by the hand and pulled him down so they were obscured by the grass. The Bull slipped his goggles off so at least one of them could watch them directly, peering through the grass to their illuminated faces.

“Keep yours on,” the Bull said, when Dorian reached for his goggles. “You’ve got to be able to see if anything else tries to come at us.”

“Right,” Dorian replied, so quietly that if they weren’t pressed together so tightly, the Bull wouldn’t have hurt them. “Do they see us?”

“I’m not sure,” the Bull said. “They aren’t acting like they saw us, but they were just on the other side of the river bank.”

They might have seen them before the eclipse. They might have been debating how best to kill them.

Dorian took a shaky breath in, held it for a moment, and then let it out slowly.

“You’ve got three of those fire grenades left, right?” the Bull asked. He pulled away from Dorian slightly, slowly, so he had room to stand up and swing his axe if he had to.

“It doesn’t matter,” Dorian said.

“Yeah, it kind of does.”

“No, you don’t understand. They can’t cross the river during a blackout, so it doesn’t matter.”

The Bull was less than certain of that. The Careers were milling around the riverbank, torches in hand. They were speaking, but the Bull couldn’t make out more than an indistinct muttering.

“Can you get a grenade out just to make me feel better?” the Bull asked him.

Dorian was rolling his eyes, he was sure of it. But he reached down and pulled something small and round out of his pouch anyway.

Across the riverbed, the boy from Four stepped into the river; this wasn’t the best place to ford the river, the water being nearly two feet deep and not exactly moving slow, but he kept his footing.

“Get ready to fi-”

The rest of the Bull’s words were drowned out by a hellish wail as something rose out of the water. It looked a bit like a ghost, if ghosts could come from things that weren’t people. It floated above the Careers, as the temperature plummeted several degrees and little bits of ice started to form in the river only to be swept downstream.

“Run!” Dorian hissed, and they ran.

 

* * *

They ended up back in the forest, sitting above the understory, eating pawpaws and trying to ignore the skittering and thumping coming from below them.

“The rocks aren’t safe either,” Dorian said. “There’s some kind of- I don’t know. A lava mutt, it looked like to me, in the brief moment I saw it before running away very quickly.”

“Yeah, I don’t blame you,” the Bull said.

They sat in silence for a time, chewing. Dorian spat a seed down, causing the skittering creature to emitted a shriek and thump impotently at the tree trunk.

“So, if there’s a lava mutt by the rocks and an ice thing in the river, then do you think this thing is just from the grasslands?”

“As opposed to..?”

“Also being from the forest. Because if they’re not from the forest, then that kind of implies that there’s something else here that we haven’t met yet.”

“ _ Vishante kaffas _ ,” Dorian swore. It was the first time he’d done so clearly enough for the Bull to catch the shape of the words. “Well, let’s hope neither of us finds out.”

They took the long way back, once the eclipse had ended, steering well clear of the river.

“There are a few other green patches,” Dorian said abruptly, after they’d been walking for a while. The rock outcropping was back in sight, and the sun was not quite down. “Upriver from the rocks. Some bushes with berries, another grove, a patch of what might be another kind of root vegetable? I don’t know. I was trying to avoid the temptation.”

“We’ll check them out tomorrow,” the Bull promised. “If they’re food I recognize, we’ll take what we can.”

Otherwise, they were actually doing pretty okay. They still had the bulk of the chicory, and some pawpaws. It was enough to eat a decent amount for a few days, and they had time to go back and gather more, barring- well. Barring Hunger Games shit.

Still. There was no sense in getting anxious over having enough to eat for a few days. That was better than he had it most winters back home.

They reached the rocks long before moonrise, and took a moment to do their business before they check the various hidey holes for spider incursions.

“Did you move all this sod up here yourself?” the Bull asked, once Dorian was satisfied that there weren’t any spiders in residence. It wasn’t the hole they’d used last night- it was a little deeper and a lot narrower, but hopefully if they were already hidden away before the bird went hunting they would be left alone. Dorian didn’t seem worried about it, at least.

“No. Livia helped.”

“Your district partner?”

Dorian nodded. “It’s funny, you know. I really wanted to hate her.”

“Makes it easier, I guess,” the Bull observed.

He and Adaar hadn’t done more than exchange full names and agree that they should split in arena. That was also supposed to make it easier.

“Not- I mean. I wanted to hate her at home,” Dorian explained. “Our parents had decided that we should marry when we were still toddlers. I’ve never taken well to being told what to do, so I was quite determined to hate her.”

“Oh.” The Bull didn’t really know what to say to that.

“It didn’t work very well once outside of Three. We agreed to ally on the train ride to the Capitol.”

The Bull nodded.

“We grabbed two packs and ran for it. Livia realized that this could be a shelter, and we spent most of the first day covering these holes up with sod we cut from the far side of the rocks.”

And the next day she’d died.

“I killed the Career,” Dorian said. “The one who killed her. It was- I thought I would choke up, if it came down to it. I’d never killed anyone before. But I didn’t. I didn’t hesitate at all.”

The Bull was torn. He wanted to tell Dorian that it was fine, but he knew that hearing it would be less than comforting.

“And then, after the hovercraft had taken her body away, I realized that she had been carrying all of our food.”

The Bull laughed. He couldn’t help himself, and after a moment Dorian joined in.


	3. Day Seven

There was a fallen log that served as a bridge over the river, and they took it the following morning to a little patch of berries that the Bull thankfully knew a lot about.

“They’re autumn olives!” he said, grinning.

Dorian looked back at him in confusion. “I’m fairly certain that olives grow on trees, not bushes. And aren’t red with spots. And it’s not even  _ August _ , I don’t think, much less autumn.”

“They’re berries, they’re just called autumn olives,” the Bull told him. “They make some really nice fruit leather.”

“Now you’re just making shit up,” Dorian said. “ _ Fruit leather _ , honestly.”

He had no clue what he was talking about, but he also had a point. This was all the sort of stuff he would be gathering towards the end of August, or the beginning of September, depending on what kind of year it had been. It was maybe the end of July? They’d been in the arena a week, now. And before that, it had been, what, another week? Plus a day to travel to the Capitol…

It was July nineteenth. That’s what it was. It was the nineteenth of July, and none of this food should be here.

“What? Did I insult your district’s honor with my doubt?” Dorian asked.

The Bull realized that he’d been staring mutely at the bushes. “Nah,” the Bull said, shaking his head. “Just woolgathering. We should probably leave these for now. We’ve still got to finish the pawpaws before they go bad, and berries are hard to transport without some kind of container. You said there were other green patches?”

“Yes, up this way,” Dorian said. “You know, it occurs to me that if these aren’t poisonous, then they are a more obvious source of wild food than is usual. Do you think there’s a reason for that?”

The Bull shrugged. Yeah, that was another good point. “It’d be a reliable place for people to come to, especially since they all seem to be near the river. The Gamemakers could- call a feast or something here, I guess.” They could do a lot worse than a feast, but it was probably better not to say that out loud.

“Not to mention what the Careers might do,” Dorian pointed out. “Do you think they’ve noticed? I mean, they do have the supplies from the Cornucopia. One of them’s dead and the other is- I don’t know where, but she’s not with them. They only have to split those supplies up four ways, so they won’t need to forage.”

“Doesn’t mean they won’t take note,” the Bull pointed out. “If they have trouble finding us, then they might start patrolling around the patches that look like they’ve been foraged.”

“I suppose we should keep away from the pawpaws, then,” Dorian said. “It’s a pity. I was rather beginning to like them.”

“We should look for other patches too,” the Bull said, already planning. Their remaining pawpaws would see them through today, easily. They could make a late breakfast of the autumn olives tomorrow, and then continue on, continue scouting upriver and making a mark of edibles. They could take what would keep, eat what would not, and gather their strength a bit.

“The grove of trees is a little further on,” Dorian said, veering further away from the river and deeper into the grass. “It looked like some kind of nut.”

“Good,” the Bull said. “Nuts generally store well.”

Dorian lead him over to a rock that was more of a turquoise than the deep navy blue the rocks they slept by were. The green patch was nestled up against it in the sun, and turned out to be leeks.

“Nice,” the Bull said. “I’ve had nothing but fruit the whole time I’ve been in here. I could use something a little more pungent.”

“Is there more fruit than the pawpaws?” Dorian asked.

“There are some persimmons further east,” the Bull told him, jerking his head back the way they came. “Other side of the Cornucopia, though.”

Even though the Gamemakers wouldn’t allow people to stay in the Cornucopia, exactly, the Careers tended to keep their base nearby. The Bull’s guess was that they’d staked out a grove or something, and hauled their supplies up into the branches to deter scavengers.

That was not a direction they wanted to be travelling in.

They gathered the leeks up mostly in silence, until Dorian reached out and touched his hand to the back of the Bull’s.

“You know,” he said, pitching his voice low. “The simpler reason for all this food is just that starvation makes for a dull death.”

“Yeah, there’s that,” the Bull replied.

And more: if the Gamemakers felt the games were getting dull, if they weren’t providing enough entertainment in their struggles…

“I think once we-”

That was when they first heard the cannon.

Both he and Dorian froze, and then swerved around, looking for the source of the death. The plains stretched out before them, flat and pink and just about endless. There was no sign of who died, or where they’d been.

A second cannon sounded. A breeze stirred from west of them, and the Bull could just make out the sound of screaming.

“We should go,” Dorian said. He’d already stuffed as many of the leeks as possible into his bag.

“Yeah,” the Bull agreed, grabbing his pack and standing up.

The third cannon sounded before they reached the fallen log, and crossed back over the river.

A fourth sounded after.

They were almost back to the rocks when they saw the hovercraft on its way to pick up the bodies.

“Do you think that was the Careers?” the Bull asked.

“I hope not,” Dorian said. “I’d hate to meet anything that took out four Careers at once.”

“There’s no way of knowing until night fall,” the Bull pointed out.

“I suppose we should wash off the leeks,” Dorian said. “Whatever just happened, I doubt that any survivors will be moving very quickly now.”

They spent the rest of the afternoon rinsing the dirt from the leeks and dividing them evenly between the two packs. They topped off their water supply, and then staked out a hole- the one from their first night- to wait until nightfall for the news.

The news was not good.

The anthem played and the faces of the deceased were projected into the sky. The girl from Two was first, the one the Bull had injured getting his pack, a dark-haired elf named Fiona that had probably expected to do better. Next was the girl from Six, a bright little red-haired dwarf, and then-

Adaar. The next face to appear in the sky was Adaar’s.

He could barely take in the final face- the girl from Twelve, another elf- he was so shocked.

He’d known that she would probably die. They were both probably going to die. He’d known that when he volunteered. He still hadn’t actually imagined it happening, and the reality was-

“We thought about allying with her,” Dorian said.

The Bull tore his eyes from the now-dark sky and stared at him. Dorian kept his face turned up, and continued.

“Livia and I, with the girl from Twelve. I liked her, she was funny and knew how to find food.  Ultimately we decided it would be a bad plan. What would happen if it was just us three at the end?”

“What were you going to do if it was just you two?” the Bull asked.

“Play a game of bird-water-stone to determine the victor,” Dorian replied. “Did you have a plan with-” Dorian suddenly turned to face him, covering his face with his hand at the same time. “ _ Fasta vass _ , I’m an ass.”

There wasn’t really much the Bull could say to that.

“Was she- did you know her?” Dorian asked.

“Not really. She was from one of the logging camps clear on the other side of the district, and I was in one of the lumber mill villages. We only met on the train.”

“Good, I’m glad,” Dorian said. “I mean- I wouldn’t want you to have lost a friend.”

The Bull shrugged. It still hurt, even if they weren’t friends.

“What was her name?” Dorian asked.

“Hirola,” the Bull said, thinking  _ Herah Adaar _ . That wasn’t a name for the Capitol’s ears, though. “She was the Hirola.”

“I’ll remember that,” Dorian said, and fell silent.

After a few moments, he stood and pulled the sod back up to cover their hole. The Bull handed off his jacket and got out his sleeping bag, and they went to bed without another word.


	4. Day Eight

The next day dawned clear and cool. They headed down to the autumn olive bushes for breakfast, and ate their fill. Dorian couldn’t stop looking further upriver, and neither could the Bull.

“The grove I saw earlier is in that direction,” he said finally. “Do you think we should chance it?”

“Chance whatever it was the caused that bloodbath being between us and the grove, or chance looking for it directly?”

“Pick one,” Dorian said.

The Bull thought about it. “How tall were the trees?”

“Uh- tree sized?” Dorian replied. “They seemed to be taller than the pawpaw trees, as I recall. They could also have been shorter than the pollen trees, I’m not too sure.”

“And they’re by the plains still, right?” the Bull asked. “Overlooking a flat area?”

“As I recall,” Dorian repeated. “Why?”

“Because if whatever is not between it and us, then that grove might be a good place to scout,” the Bull said. “I can climb up top, get a good look around. Maybe even spot whatever it was that caused it, or where it happened.”

“So, we’re going to chance it then?”

“Yeah. I mean- what else can we do?”

It was day eight of the games. Those four deaths would tide the audience over for a time, but it was still a lot healthier for them to give the Capitol something to watch.

“Fair point.”

They set off down the stream, passing by the leek patch and over a hill. The grove of tree was visible perhaps a mile beyond that: tall and familiar looking. A twenty minute jog confirmed it: shagbark.

“I’ve never heard of a shagbark nut,” Dorian said.

“You ever have hickory nuts?” the Bull asked. “This is pretty much the same thing, just more difficult to crack.”

Dorian brightened. “Do they keep well?”

“Yeah, if we can dry them out a little they could keep for years,” the Bull told him.

Dorian laughed. “Well, hopefully it won’t come down to that.”

He gave Dorian the run-down on hickory nut gathering- specifically, how to tell if a weevil had gotten to it already- and then picked the sturdiest-looking tree to climb.

He was kind of on the big side, even for a qunari, but tree climbing was less about size than many people supposed. Oh, he wouldn’t be able to climb all the way to the top like some of the elves and littler kids in the home could, but he knew how to place his hands and feet to get a far up as he could.

He could make out quite a bit from a height of about sixty feet or so. There was a bend in the river maybe three miles out, and nestled along it was another grove, one that might have been the sight of whatever it was that had happened last night. The Bull could see that some of the trees looked lopsided, uprooted. Some of them were missing foliage. He thought some of them might even be charred, though it was hard to tell at this distance.

They were short- probably some kind of fruit tree, then.

“How’s the weather up there?” Dorian asked.

“Not terrible, I think.”

He climbed back down and filled Dorian in on what he’d seen.

“Did it look abandoned?” Dorian asked. “If it was abandoned, there might be something left for us to scavenge or something.”

“I didn’t see any smoke or anything that looked like movement, if that’s what you mean,” the Bull said. “We’ll be careful.”

Adaar would have been careful too- probably also the girl from Twelve, because there was no way anyone got that good with a bow by just picking it up and shooting, she had to have had some experience poaching. But what they probably hadn’t known was to expect trouble- trouble specifically from that place, at least. He and Dorian _did_ know, and hopefully that would give them an edge.

“You’ve got three of those grenades left, right?”

“Yes. And you’ve got your axe?”

“Yep.”

They set out. It took them the better part of an hour to reach the grove: the Bull was gratified to hear that the birdcalls hadn’t dropped away. The trees were fairly short fruit-bearing ones: nectarines. The Bull could smell the fragrance of ripened fruit a mile away.

“Well, if this works out, I suppose that will be dinner,” Dorian remarked.

The Bull nodded in reply, and kept his axe at the ready.

It had been a campsite, that much was obvious. There was a fire pit, and a stack of green wood drying out nearby, and weirdly enough a small pool of water, in which half a cage had been submerged. The cage was pretty beat up, twisted and open, looking like it had burst from the inside.

“Where did they get that?” the Bull asked.

“I suppose it was in the Cornucopia,” Dorian replied. “Cages like that have been used before. I remember seeing the recap of one from before we were born- before the second Quarter Quell even, I believe. For some reason the male tribute from Two was able to hold on to the body of the girl from One, and used to try and taunt the boy from One into doing something stupid. It didn’t work. One won that year.”

“How did you watch a game from before we were born?” the Bull asked.

“I was home sick, recaps are just about the only thing on the TV that isn’t educational,” Dorian replied.

“You get enough electricity for that?” the Bull asked.

“Generally? I mean, I’ve heard that some of the poorer families have difficulty finding coin to feed the meters with,” he said. “I suppose it’s like that in your home?”

The Bull shook his head. “We hardly ever have power. Trees keep falling on the lines, and it can be weeks before they’re fixed. There are backup generators in most buildings, but we don’t generally have fuel for keep them running all the time. Even the saw mill goes down at times.”

They’d be running now: the Hunger Games were required viewing, after all. Everyone would be gathering in the village square, watching this on the huge screen that had been set up.

“But- but how do you keep your food good if you can’t refrigerate it?” Dorian asked.

“We tend to either eat it fresh or eat it dried or canned,” the Bull replied. “Why, how do you do it in Three?”

“Well, most of our food is canned too,” Dorian admitted. “But there are leftovers, sometimes, and normally we get milk in boxes, and sometimes fresh fruit and vegetables. Sometimes when the bakeries were full, Livia would buy a whole bunch of bread and fill the freezer.”

“Livia?” the Bull asked, startled. “Like, your district partner?”

“Oh, no,” Dorian said. “Livia Alexius, not Livia Herathinos. She was my mentor’s wife- not Maevaris’ wife, obviously, but my- is that an  _ ear _ ?”

Dorian pointed, and the Bull looked. Sure enough, next to a great big gash in the tree was a dark bloodstain and, into between the roots on the ground was an ear.

The Bull walked over to it. An axe made that mark, he thought, and there were short strands of blond hair still caught in the bark.

“I think that belonged to Cullen,” he said.

“Are you sure?” Dorian said, coming over to stand next to him. “I mean- that could be the girl from Six’s ear. There’s not a great deal of difference between dwarven ears and human ones.”

The Bull shook his head, and pointed to the hair. “The girl from Six was a redhead.”

“Hmm,” was Dorian’s reply. “What do think happened here?”

“I think that the Hirola took Cullen’s ear, but aside from that? No idea.” The Bull shrugged.

They made a pass of the camp. There wasn’t a whole lot of useful material to be found there, just nectarines and a few pieces of rope that had probably been used to haul packs up out of the reach of predators. The Bull kept coming back to the cage, staring at it as Dorian coiled the rope and tucked it into their packs. There was something about-

Frost. The bars of the cage were coated in frost.

“Shit!” the Bull yelped and jumped back.

“What?” Dorian said, one hand going to the pouch of grenades he still wore.

“The ice mutt from the river,” the Bull said, pointing to the cage.

Dorian squinted, and then he noticed the frost too. “Oh.”

“Yeah. Oh.”

“Did they capture one- but why would they- when did they even have a chance to get the cage, much less-”

“I think this was the Careers’ camp, not the girls’ camp,” the Bull said. “They must have captured the mutt when we saw them at the river the other day, and brought it back here.”

“But why?”

“As a trap,” the Bull said. “Maybe they lit a signal fire and we missed the smoke, or maybe Fiona, that girl from Two, was some kind of double agent and lead them here. Either way, something went wrong.”

“Not wrong enough,” Dorian muttered.

“Maybe they were followed, then, and the girls jumped them before they had the thing secure,” the Bull said. “I’m just guessing, I don’t actually know more than you. They died and the Careers got away.”

“Minus an ear,” Dorian remarked. “Do you think the pack’s split up? That doesn’t strike me as an injury you can walk away from easily, especially given how head wounds tend to bleed.”

“I don’t know,” the Bull said. “Someone came back after it was over and cut their packs down. And none of them are dead- we’d have heard the cannon, if anyone had died.”

“We’ll have to see, then,” Dorian said. He took a deep breath, and then added. “So- nectarines.”

The Bull gave him a look.

“What?”

“This is the first time you’ve been able to identify a plant,” the Bull said. “I’m wondering if this is important enough for the Capitol to cancel school.”

“Ha!” Dorian said, before adding. “We only ever got a few types of fresh fruit in Three. Cherries, apples, pears, peaches and nectarines.”

“Peaches and nectarines are the same fruit,” the Bull told him.

“They are not!”

“Are too.”

“You’re making that up,” Dorian said. “Peaches have fuzz.”

“Yeah, and nectarines grow on the same tree as peaches- though not always the other way around,” the Bull said. “It’s like- I don’t know. You ever notice how two horned parents can have kids with no horns but two hornless parents with always have hornless kids?”

“I can’t say that I have,” Dorian replied drily. “As there aren’t a lot of qunari in Three. But eye color in humans works in much the same principle.”

They ate some nectarines, put some more in their packs for later, and then started off back downstream to the rocks.

That was when they heard the rumbling.

For a split second, the Bull thought that the cannon had gone off again. But the rumbling just kept going and going, and the ground beneath shook with it.

“Is this an earthquake?” Dorian asked, looking around. He stopped when he saw the cloud on the horizon. “Oh no, what-”

“Stampede,” the Bull realized. He grabbed Dorian by the arm and pulled him forwards. “Come on!”

“Shouldn’t we be running away from it?” Dorian asked, though he was keeping up.

“We need to get up above it, and the shagbark’s closer!” the Bull told him.

He gave Dorian a boost and then followed him up. They found a pair of sturdier branches to cling to and then waited.

The wapiti arrived five minutes later, thundering around the edges of the little grove.  The leaves protected them from the worst of the dirt, but all the vibrations sent hickory nuts dropping onto their heads.

Dorian covered his head with his pack. The Bull did the same.

It took what felt like an hour before the stampede stopped, but just because they’d stopped moving didn’t mean that the wapiti were gone.

“So,” the Bull said, surveying the area around the grove. It was basically all wapiti as far as the eye could see. “I guess we’re staying here tonight.”

“Maybe they’ll move on?” Dorian suggested hopefully.

“We should probably set up camp anyway,” the Bull pointed out. The sun was already beginning to set.

The Bull’s pack held a sheet of plastic and a collapsible shovel. He dug a shallow ditch for them to hide in, and Dorian lined it with the plastic sheet while the Bull worked on getting enough leafy branches together to make a kind of roof for it.

They stopped for a moment to eat their nectarine dinner. Then the Bull rolled out his sleeping bag and handed off his jacket before pulling the roof over. With the dirt he had packed on the sides, there was just enough space for them to crawl in, one after the other.

“Does it get colder out here than it does on the rocks?” he asked.

“Not really,” the Bull said, but the way the temperature plummeted after the anthem played called him a liar.

He wondered if he should offer to share his sleeping bag with Dorian again. They were already touching- it made sense for them to share. He’d just decided to do so when Dorian started to snore.

He supposed it really was time for him to sleep. He took a deep breath in, and started counting heartbeats, until he drifted off too.


	5. Day Nine

He dreamed again, and like before, his dream was about Tama.

It was one of her lessons. She pointed to the new Peacekeepers in the village square:  _ See them, Ashkaari? It’s better for all of us if they like you. _

It was true too. Everyone knew that the Peacekeepers were less likely to be dicks with people they liked around. Tama had their village’s Head Peacekeeper wrapped around her little finger. That’s why people weren’t getting whipped anymore, when it wasn’t winter.

These Peacekeepers weren’t going to be very important, probably, but he had to start somewhere, so he approached a guy who was leaning against the garden wall by himself, staring out into the forest.

The new Peacekeeper was Dorian. He could tell because the first words out of his mouth were “ _ Fasta vass _ , is there anything but trees here?”

“Well, this is the lumber district,” the Bull pointed out. “And we are in the middle of a forest.”

“So it’s all trees, trees, trees until you never want to look another oak in the face again?” Dorian replied.

“Well, there are a few other things here,” the Bull relented. “I could show you, if you like.”

“I would like, thank you,” Dorian said, looking surprised but pleased.

It was spring, and the meadows were resplendent with flowers. A little further on it was summer, and the salt marshes had all kinds of berries and treats. Further still, they climbed a hill in autumn, and watched the leaves turn all kinds of brilliant colors- red, yellow, and orange, interspaced with a few pinks and purples courtesy of the Capitol’s mutt seeds- and fall from the trees. It was winter when they returned to the village: the air was crisp and cold, and snow was just beginning to fall. Dorian shivered, and the Bull wrapped an arm around him. Dorian took his hand to keep it there, smiling when the Bull gave it a little squeeze.

“Well,” Dorian said, once they’d reached home. The Peacekeeper barracks were right next to the community home- well, not really, but in his dream it was. “I suppose this where we part.”

“I guess so,” the Bull said.

But they didn’t part. They just stood there, facing one another as their breath misted out from the mouths and noses, and waited. Dorian still held his hand. Then, after a moment, he raised it to his lips and kissed the back of it.

“Goodnight,” he said, and let it drop.

“Yeah, it was,” the Bull replied, smiling dumbly after him as Dorian disappeared into the Peacekeeper building.

Tama was waiting for him. She didn’t look happy.

“What?” the Bull asked. “You told me to make him like me.”

“Oh Ashkaari,” Tama said. Her expression was full of pity; her voice was as flat and lifeless as it had been in his first dream. “You weren’t supposed to like him back.”

The Bull woke up with a gasp, and then coughed as something wet hit the back of his throat. Two more droplets hit him in the face.

“Oh for fuck’s sake,” the Bull said.

Somewhere down by his elbow, Dorian jerked awake. “What is- is it  _ raining _ ?”

“Seems like it,” the Bull said as thunder sounded in the distance.

“ _ Fasta vass _ ,” Dorian swore.

 

* * *

Dorian wriggled back out of their shelter and covered the roof with as much of the plastic as he could. It wasn’t all that much, really. He dragged some more branches over, trying to create a more waterproof structure, but with the Bull’s encouragement just laid the Bull’s jacket, waterproof side up, over the gap, securing it with a few more branches in an effort to keep it from blowing away.

The rain stopped trickling in, save for at the very bottom. The Bull moved their packs and the bottom of the sleeping bag away: with luck, the leak wouldn’t pool enough to make a problem for them.

If the water was going to pool that badly, then they were going to have bigger problems than a soaked sleeping bag to deal with. Like an actual flood. Like actually  _ drowning _ .

They were pretty close to the stream, but they were also up a steep bank. It didn’t much look like a floodplain, but that didn’t count for much in a Hunger Game arena where all the grass was fucking pink.

“We’ll have to check the stream, every now and again,” the Bull said, once Dorian had returned, shivering and soaked through. “Make sure it’s not going to overflow and flood us out.”

Dorian nodded distractedly. “Well, the wapiti didn’t seem concerned, if that’s any help.”

“It is, actually.” Who knew what the Capitol’s tinkering had done to their instincts, but generally if the animals weren’t panicking then there wasn’t much to panic about.

Dorian kicked off his boots, and lay his sodden socks out over them in an attempt to let them dry. Under his jacket his shirt was more or less okay, but his pants were pretty well soaked. His hands hesitated on his waistband.

“Hang on a sec,” the Bull said. He wriggled free of the sleeping bag, and held it open and unzipped. “There you go, I got it all warmed up for you and everything.”

Dorian hesitated for a moment more, and then shucked off his pants. “Thanks,” he said, sliding in.

It was a slow day, for them at least. He supposed someone else might be doing something interesting- there might be something else that the rain was serving as a dramatic backdrop to- but even if the Capitol wanted to watch them shoot the shit, they couldn’t really have bugs in the ditch the Bull had just dug less than a day ago. They ate their nectarines for breakfast. They talked a little about what school and work was like in their districts. In Seven, if you live in a village you almost certainly started working some kind of trade when you hit reaping age, whether that was in one of the mills, or a trade like carpentry, or as a shopkeeper’s assistant. Every place like that had some kind of four-hour shift for kids to work around the school schedule. If you lived in the logging camps you started even sooner, and spent even less time in school. It wasn’t unusual for the logging camp kids not to know how to read very well, even though admitting it made Tama look pained.

“Reading should be for everyone,” she told him once, and only once. That was how he knew it wasn’t something he should say out loud now.

Of course, things were different in Three, where all the electronics were made. Not only made, like they were manufactured there either: they were thought up there, designed and created and tested and redesigned until it became something the Capitol could use before it ever saw production in Three’s factories. That would have been Dorian’s job, inventing things. His parents were from that class, and his partner/almost-fiancée. He’d been apprenticed to another when he’d hit reaping age.

“My specialty was virology, not electronics,” Dorian said. “We study diseases, and try to stay ahead of the antiviral-immune strains.”

“What’s that?”

It was a lot, apparently. Plagues that couldn’t be fixed even with a trip to the big town and the most expensive vial of the Capitol’s fanciest medicines your friends and family could pool their resources to buy, even when they  _ should _ clear up in a day or two. The nasty little bugs that apparently got more and more resistant to those medicines with every passing year, some of which could stay dormant in a person’s body for years before they started showing signs of it.  _ Walking bombs _ , Dorian called them.

“There was a really bad one that swept through last year, after the Victory Tour,” Dorian continued. “A type of hemorrhagic fever. People who didn’t bleed out died of renal failure. It was awful. Livia Alexius died like that. Felix was ill too, and his liver still isn’t working quite right, even though the fever’s gone.”

Felix was the son of the man Dorian had been apprenticed too. And he was the sickly fourteen-year-old whose place Dorian had taken. He hadn’t said as much, but the Bull could guess.

They took turns going outside to take a piss: one person going out in nothing but their boots while the other waited in their shelter, fully clothed and ready to flee with their supplies if need be. Dorian’s clothing never quite dried out. It probably wouldn’t, until the rain let up and they could lay it out in the sun a bit. The Bull was trying not to think about what his jacket would look like once it did.

They drank enough water that Dorian could put his jug down at the foot of the shelter, where it was still leaking. They brought the jug out with them to empty when they took a piss. It kept things from getting too wet.

They made a lunch out of some of the leeks they’d picked. The Bull found some rocks they could use to crack open the hickory nuts, and they made a dinner out of the nut meat. Dorian also ate a chicory root, much to his own displeasure.

“This is awful,” he moaned, and took another bite.

“No one’s making you eat it, you know,” the Bull pointed out.

“Well, I’m not going to throw away food during the Hunger Games, and I refuse to carry around a half-nibbled root in my pack,” Dorian said and took another bite with a theatrical grimace the Bull probably could have seen even without the goggles.

He choked it all down, and then brought the jug out for one last emptying before they turned in for the night. His pants were still damp from being soaked through that morning, but he didn’t want to press for Dorian to take them off. It was enough of a struggle trying to get him to share the sleeping bag, even though the Bull’s jacket wasn’t available to keep him warm overnight.

“It’s fairly warm in here,” Dorian pointed out. “And I don’t even have my jacket on yet.”

“That doesn’t mean it won’t get cold later,” the Bull pointed out, though Dorian had a point. Reinforcing the roof meant that their shelter was retaining a lot of the day’s worth of body heat.

In the end they compromised: Dorian slept on top of the sleeping bag, which the Bull left unzipped with Dorian’s promise that he’d make use of it if he got cold overnight. They fell asleep like that, back to back, as the rain continued to pour down above them.


	6. Day Ten

When he woke up, Dorian was on top of him, one hand pressed over the Bull’s mouth.

The Bull grunted, and Dorian pressed down harder. His head shook, but he made no sound, and did not look away from the entrance to their shelter. The Bull realized two things in very short order. First, that Dorian’s other hand was inside the pouch where he kept the grenades, and second, that there was a large clawed foot right outside their metaphorical door.

The Bull stayed very, very quiet and reached for his axe. The mutt clawed impatiently at the damp earth for a while, and then leapt. It knocked a few branches of their shelter askew, but mostly it hit one of the wapiti.

The animal let out a terrified bleat, and the Bull could feel every other wapiti in the herd shuffle quickly away from both it and the mutt. The wapiti let out one last bleat before there was the wet sound of meat being torn apart.

The sounds of the mutt eating continued for several minutes, and it was over an hour before they heard the mutt take off with the sound of leathery flapping wings and a loud shriek. It was several more minutes before they actually dared to move.

“Well,” Dorian said as he surveyed the landscape. It was not quite dawn, but the dim light was enough to see by. The stream was swollen and fast-moving, but not a threat to them where it was, and they might still be able to use the fallen log to get back across it. Most of the wapiti had moved, either during the storm or because of the mutt, and they’d be able to leave the grove today. “I don’t know about you, but I’m certainly awake.”

“Yep,” the Bull said. “Nothing like a little mortal peril to get the blood pumping in the morning.”

They dismantled the shelter, got their shit in order, and picked up some more hickory nuts. Then they went back downstream, stopping briefly for more leeks, and continued on to where the autumn olives were ready and waiting for their breakfast, and there was a small rocky outcropping for the Bull to lay out his jacket and plastic sheet to dry. It was a cold morning, but the sun was strong, and hopefully that would help. They ate, and washed the leeks, and then waited.

“I think we should do a resource check,” he said. “See what each of us has in our packs.”

“An excellent idea,” Dorian said, eyeing the Bull’s pack. “The plastic sheeting could have doubled as a blanket for me, you know.”

The thought had occurred to the Bull after he’d used it to line their shelter the other night, yeah. “Hey, I gave you my jacket,” he pointed out.

Dorian grumbled, but didn’t argue the point.

In addition to the sleeping bag, the plastic sheet, the shovel, and the wild food they’d gathered, the Bull had his water jug and a canteen he’d picked up with the pack at the Cornucopia. There was also a compass which didn’t point north, a booklet of matches, and a block of something which the Bull had thought was for starting fires, but Dorian assured him was actually some kind of synthetic food.

“Protein blocks,” he said, unable to keep his nose from wrinkling in distaste. “For when spam is too rich for your blood.”

Spam was one of those treats which people in Seven rarely saw unless they had a victor that year, but he didn’t feel like mentioning that to Dorian.

Dorian’s pack held his water jug and portion of their wild food, and not much else. There was the little vial of iodine, a small first aid kit that was mostly bandages, an empty bag of what Dorian admitted had been some dried fruit he probably should have eaten more slowly, and a little silver packet that the Bull was very happy to see indeed.

“That’s a blanket!” he said.

“No it’s not,” Dorian said, looking very concerned for his mental state. “It’s a square of tinfoil.”

“No, really,” the Bull insisted, opening the packet. He spread out the blanket, which looked like nothing but he knew from experience was really, really good at keeping you warm. “It’s Peacekeeper tech. I’ve seen it in Seven, where they’ve got the ranger stations and such.”

He’d also traded for it. When things got bad in his village- when the trains couldn’t get through with supplies because of downed trees or just plain bad weather- even the Peacekeepers had to barter if they wanted to eat. He could give them his tesserae grain and oil in exchange for goods like their blankets, and go hungry for a few days until he could go down to the marshes. There were always plenty of cattails and tubers and watercress, and sometimes you could find mussels and hibernating frogs buried in the mud. Highbush cranberries could have fruit throughout winter in theory, but in practice most of the bushes were stripped clean after the first snowfall. Occasionally, when things were bad, he risked poaching and set out snares for rabbits and beavers. And there was always pine bark- you really, really didn’t want to interfere with the trees in Seven unless you were desperate, but if you were desperate, the phloem of pine trees was edible.

If they were desperate, the Peacekeepers would start doing it themselves, and shooting anyone who they caught dipping into that food source. It meant one less mouth to compete with, and a corpse to blame for the damages.

“Here, try it,” he said to Dorian.

Dorian wrapped it around his shoulders, wincing at the loud crinkling noise it made at every movement. He looked skeptical. Then he looked aggrieved.

“Warmer?” the Bull asked innocently.

“Fine,” Dorian huffed. “So long as I can get used to the noise, this will make sleeping easier, I suppose. If it doesn’t tear.”

“That’s a good point.” While those things were sturdier than they looked, that wasn’t really a high bar. “Maybe we should just roll out the sheeting for ground cover tonight, and then stick with the sleeping bag and jacket combination. Unless you’ve changed your mind about sharing.”

“I have not,” Dorian replied.

They packed their things back up, and refilled their water jugs. Dorian added the iodine, and then started collecting berries in the empty bag he had leftover from the dried fruit. The Bull checked, and found that the plastic sheet still had a few droplets of water he felt okay wiping up with his cuff, and his jacket wasn’t too damp. It might get uncomfortable once the sun went down and the temperature dropped, but right now he thought he might be more comfortable with it on.

He folded the plastic back up and tucked it into his pack, and then put his jacket back on. By the time he turned back to Dorian, he’d finished with the berries, and was packing them away.

“So,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but this is officially as much food as I’ve had on me since the Games began.”

Whatever he was going to suggest was lost as the arena was plunged back into total darkness.

“ _ Vishante kaffas _ ,” Dorian swore as the Bull pulled the night vision goggles back on. “Bull, we need-”

“To get away from the river, I remember,” the Bull said, already heading up the riverbank into the grass.

The grass wasn’t going to be safer for long. The skittering mutts would be released any second, if they hadn’t been already.

“Can we make the forest?” Dorian asked.

“The shagbark grove is closer,” the Bull pointed out. “Let’s go.”

They ran as fast as they could, but the grove was still a good two miles away from the autumn olive bushes, and it was the tenth day of the games. Neither one of them was in the best shape of their lives. By the time the shagbark was in front of them, there was a lot of skittering.

Just before they would have left the grasslands, the mutt they’d spotted that morning landed in front of them. He could tell that it was the same kind of mutt because of the clawed feet. The rest of the thing looked kind of like a cross between a horse and a bat, and covered in scales.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” the Bull yelled.

The skittering didn’t stop, but it did sound like it was retreating. At least they wouldn’t have to fight all of the mutts at once. Fighting this one was going to be tough enough. It was too close to the shagbark to risk the grenade, and- and  _ Dorian didn’t know that _ .

“Dorian, don’t-”

It was too late. Dorian had the grenade out, and had thrown it before the Bull could get the words out. The Bull could only watch in horror as the mutt went up, whiting out his vision with the light. By the time he’d fumbled the goggles back off, it was rearing back. It was hard to tell with the white spots dancing in front of his vision, but he thought that it might be close to lighting some of the branches on fire.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,  _ vashedan _ ,” he growled. He dropped his pack. Hopefully he’d be in good enough shape to get it later, but if he wasn’t, then Dorian didn’t have to worry about his supplies being carted away by the hovercraft when it came for his body.

“Bull, what are you doing?”

“We can’t let it burn down the grove!” the Bull said. “If any of these trees go up, we’re screwed!”

They might be screwed anyway. If the Careers were nearby- if they saw the fire…

_ One problem at a time _ , he reminded himself. He hefted his axe and charged.

The mutt was hurting, but not hurting enough not to recognize the threat the Bull posed to it. It angled its head down and screeched, aiming to bite his head off. It was… really big. Big enough that it probably  _ could _ bite his head off, so long as it took care of the horns first, somehow.

“Bull, just- stop antagonizing it, just let it burn to death!” Dorian cried. “Let’s just get into the trees, just-”

The Bull tuned him out. The mutt ducked left, and he followed it, dancing out of range of its clawed forearm just in time. He’d killed a bear once. Just once. It had been a stupid idea from start to finish, and Tama had been right to chew him out over it, but he’d still done it. Even after the Peacekeepers took their cut of the meat, he, Vasaad and Krem had been able to drag the rest home. They still had the pelt. It made a really nice blanket during the winter.

He’d settle for getting out of this fight in one piece with the trees not on fire.

The mutt reared back again, claws extended. The Bull jumped back and to the side a little, just in time for the thing to land heavily, front legs buckling. The Bull could smell burning fat as he brought the axe down on its neck, again and again and again…

“Bull!” Dorian grabbed him by the arm. “Bull, it’s dead. Can we just-”

“The wood will catch fire,” the Bull said.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, it’s not-” Dorian huffed, and then opened the pack he was carrying. He pulled out the water jug, and poured it over the creature, plunging them back into total darkness. “There. Can we get into the trees before more show up, please?”

Dorian shoved the pack into the Bull’s chest. The Bull took it, and put his goggles back on before headed towards a likely looking tree.

That particular eclipse lasted a while. Long enough for the skittering mutts to gather at the roots of the shagbark grove, and for Dorian to turn to the Bull and say. “So, fire’s not really your thing.”

“Is fire anyone’s thing?” the Bull asked.

“I like it just fine, so long as it stays in the stove where it belongs,” Dorian said. After a moment he added “Or burns whatever’s trying to kill me to death, apparently.”

The Bull nodded.

They were silent for a time.  The skittering continued. One of the creatures butted against the tree, which shifted just enough to send a few hickory nuts that hadn’t fallen off during the stampede down on them.

“Are there ever fires in Three?” he asked.

“Sometimes? Every building has a fire suppression system, though. And concrete doesn’t really burn.”

“Everything’s wood, in Seven,” the Bull said. “It’s cheaper. You don’t have to pay for it to be shipped anywhere. So: wood floors, wood foundations, wood supports…”

“Wood roofs?”

“No, actually,” the Bull said. “The Peacekeepers' barracks, and the sawmill have tin roofs, everything else is thatched- you know, woven-together reeds and grasses and shit. The roof of the group home is mostly cattails. Tama used to have us repair it in the summer, between when school went to half-days and Reaping Day, to help keep our minds off of it, I think.”

“Group home?” Dorian asked, looking startled.

The Bull realized that he hadn’t mentioned that before. “Yeah, I grew up in the group home.”

“I take it your parents died in a fire, then?”

“No. Or if they did, it wasn’t while I was living with them,” the Bull explained. “I got dropped off in the foundling wheel when I was a baby.”

“Foundling… wheel?”

“It’s what you put babies you can’t take care of into,” the Bull explained. He’d figured that they were called something different in Three, but Dorian still looked very confused. “You know- it’s a little crèche on the outside of the group home, with a blanket-lined basket in it. You put the baby in the basket, and then turn the crank so the basket is inside the building?” Dorian continued to look confused. “Do they not have those in Three?”

“I’ve never come across them,” Dorian said. “Then again, I don’t generally associate with the group home kids.”

“Uh.” That sounded… weird. “Why not?”

Dorian rolled his eyes. “Technically, anyone can join the inventor class if they have enough talent. That’s how it’s supposed to work- but somehow, it doesn’t. Inventors have children who, after a costly education and lengthy apprenticeship, almost always turn out to be inventors themselves. Everyone else just sort of muddles along as a manufacturer or merchant, unless they get the right kind of patronage, which can be difficult to get if you don’t have parents trying to elevate your status.”

“Don’t the tamassrans in Three do that for their charges?”

“The what?”

“Tamas- you know, the people in charge of the group home.”

“I’ve always gotten the impression that the group homes were dismal places run by dismal people,” Dorian admitted. “I take it it’s not like that in Seven.”

“It’s not where I grew up.” Most of them worked in the mill, like almost everyone else in the village, but whenever Tama found that someone had skills elsewhere she pulled out the stops to get them somewhere better. Stitches had an apprenticeship with the apothecary. Skinner was an assistant at the butchers. Dalish didn’t work a job at all- she was enrolled in some kind of long-distance arboreal sciences course, and once she’d graduated from that she’d probably get embedded in one of the logging camps so she could check on the health and sustainability of the forest. He couldn’t imagine growing up without that support.

“So… if it wasn’t that fire killed your family, then what-”

“I never said that,” the Bull interrupted. “I just said that I wasn’t orphaned because of a fire. It- about five years ago, there was this thunderstorm. It was the afternoon, school had let out for the day and I was working in the mill with the older kids. The younger kids were all indoors, because of the rain. And then a lightning bolt hit the group home.”

“Oh.”

“Tama got out. She got most of the little kids out too, but the ceiling started falling in. Kids had burning straw fall on them, they had terrible burns-”

“Bull.”

“-and then one of the support beams collapsed, and that trapped some of the kids inside. We could hear them screaming, but there wasn’t anything-”

“Bull!” Dorian reached out, and grabbed him by the hand. It hurt a bit. He’d probably gotten burned when he killed that mutt. “It’s okay. You can stop there.”

“I- yeah,” the Bull said. “Yeah, sorry.”

“Well,” Dorian said shakily. He didn’t let go of the Bull’s hand. “I did ask.”

They sat in silence until the eclipse ended, and then swore as they tore the goggles from their streaming eyes. Then they shimmied down to ground level.

“We’re going to need to refill your water jug,” Dorian said.

“Yeah. I’ll do that- you grab some more nuts. We can crack them once we get back to the rocks, make room in our packs for more food.”

Dorian nodded, and handed over the iodine. The Bull went over to the stream, and inspected his hand. It stung a bit, but didn’t look too bad. More like he’d gotten a bad sunburn, more than anything else: he rubbed a little iodine on it, just to be sure that it wouldn't get infected. 

The Bull had filled his container and put the iodine in- his canteen had a filter built into it, but better safe than sorry- when the cannon sounded.

He looked up. Dorian was crouched next to his bag, frozen in place but alive. It’d been someone else, then.

“Should we run for it?” he asked quietly, voice carrying nevertheless in the quiet that had fallen over the area.

“Do you know where that came from?”

“I don’t-” A shadow fell over the grove, more of a blinking in the sun than anything else. There was nothing that should have caused it, not that the Bull could see. Dorian stood very still, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble.

Trouble didn’t come. The Bull saw the hovercraft materialize, a dark spec on the horizon, several miles behind Dorian not a minute later.

“We’re good here, I think,” the Bull said, pointing.

Dorian nodded, and resumed picking up their nuts. About a half-hour later, they were on their way back to the rocks, water purified and their packs full to the brim.

“Any guesses as to who that might have been?” Dorian asked.

“Not a clue,” the Bull said. “You?”

“My first choice would be Cullen,” Dorian said. “One less Career would be one less problem for us.”

That was certainly true.

They made it back down to the rocks with daylight to spare. The picked a hole, and lined it with plastic before settling back down. The Bull started cracking nuts, and Dorian sorted through the debris, picking out the bits of nut meat from the shells. They worked until the anthem played and the death toll was projected into the sky. It was the girl from Eight who had died. The Bull didn’t know a thing about her.

“Well. That’s sixteen dead, now.”

The Bull counted. Seven on the first day, two on the second, two on the fourth, four on the seventh and one today. Yeah, that was sixteen dead kids. “We’re in the final eight.”

Dorian stopped for a moment, and then laughed.

“What’s so funny?” the Bull asked.

“We made it to  _ the final eight _ ,” Dorian said with a snort. “They’ll be interviewing our families soon. Showing off those picturesque portrayals of how we grew up while we all sleep in the bottom corner of the screen.”

“Oh, shit, you’re right.” The Bull actually kind of looked forwards to that part of the Games, when he was watching them. The Capitol almost never let them have a look at how people lived in other districts, and while those featurettes were always heavily, obviously censored some things slipped through. Singing in the distance in Eleven, the lyrics in their dialect, some of the words recognizable as being from Qunlat, same as it was in Seven. Patched and frayed clothing in Eight, where they made clothing, but apparently couldn’t afford to buy it very often. The omnipresent coal dust in Twelve, visible everywhere from the windows to the handkerchiefs every adult seemed to cough into every other minute. The opulence in One, where more often than not the featurette opened with a lingering shot of the pretty house the tribute lived in, and included an interview with their housekeeper. The strangeness of Two, where parents and older siblings in dull jumpsuits were interviewed in front of bland concrete walls that could have been anywhere, and most of the information came from instructors at a place they called the Academy.

He remembered the small, pinched in apartments of Three, little concrete boxes with dull rugs and linoleum tiling on the floors, and whitewash on the walls. They had always looked clean, almost sterile in some cases. Sometimes, though, there would be pictures of the family on the wall. Sometimes there would be certificates too- recognition of achievements from school, and work. She’d won the chess tournament in school last year, he’d exceeded his quota at the factory eight weeks in a row, that sort of thing. He wondered if anyone ever got anything like that from the interviews with families in Seven.

“Do you think they’ll interview Tama and the other kids at the home for the family interviews?” the Bull asked.

“Why wouldn’t they?”

“Well, they don’t let me claim them as family for tesserae. I can only claim myself for that.” Which was a damn shame, because he wasn’t the only kid to do that either. If they’d been able to claim just a few more people apiece, build up a stockpile of grain and oil, then they’d probably be less hungry when winter came around.

“Well, who else would they interview?” Dorian pointed out. “I mean, even if your parents stepped forward, how could they prove it in time for the interviews?”

“They wouldn’t know anything about me anyway.”

“Well, neither do mine,” Dorian said. “What my parents know about me couldn’t fit a thimble.”

The Bull looked at him. Dorian continued to peer upwards, like they hadn’t covered the hole back up with sod when the death toll was done. “How’s that?”

“Oh, they’ve got this idea in their heads about how I should be that’s gotten farther and farther away from who I am as I’ve gotten older. We’ve been more and more distant as time’s gone on, especially after I started my apprenticeship. I would stop coming home after work, and then things came to a head at the Victory Dinner when I was fourteen. My father was trying to arrange a schedule so that Livia and I could go on dates together, in preparation for marrying once we were past reaping age. I refused, he attempted to put his foot down… one thing lead to another, and I was not-quite-officially kicked out. I’ve only spoken with them twice since- and one of those times was hearing about how foolish I was being and how I’d thrown all my potential away before boarding the train to the Capitol.”

_ Ouch. _ The Bull winced. Tama might have thought something similar, but she hadn’t said it, or let it show. She’d just told him to play to his strengths, and that she was proud of what he’d done, and would always be proud of him, no matter what happened.

“What was the other time?” he asked.

“Hmm?”

“The other time that you spoke to your parents,” the Bull clarified.

“My fifteenth birthday,” Dorian said. “Felix had attempted to orchestrate a reconciliation, and invited my parents over for dinner. Things reached the very nadir of my expectations when my father made veiled insinuations that Gereon wouldn’t want me in his house because I would corrupt his son, and then sunk even lower when my mother all but openly accused Gereon of taking advantage of me.”

“…at least she was trying to look out for you?” the Bull suggested, since that seemed like the least terrible part of that.

“That would be something, if I could believe she actually believed it and wasn’t just stirring shit.”

“You sure?” the Bull asked.

“I speak as something of a connoisseur of shit-stirring: she just wanted to pick a fight, or at least to have front-row seats to watch it unfold. And she got her wish. All four of the adults got into a shouting match that only ended when the building super came and informed them that if they didn’t stop, the Peacekeepers would be called. My parents left, and Gereon came to check on us, only to discover that after we’d snuck off to our room, we’d snuck down the fire escape and into the pub on the corner. I found a handsome boy in the year above mine who bought us both beers, I drank both of them and made him go back for something nonalcoholic for Felix, who was thirteen at the time, and then we made out. Not Felix and I- the sixteen-year-old and I.”

“Well, at least you got some sweet necking action out of it.”

Dorian snorted at the word ‘necking’. “It certainly elevated the evening from an unmitigated disaster to a slightly mitigated one.” He sighed. “Do you think now that I’ve said that, they might focus on my work instead of my sexuality?”

“It’s worth asking, I guess,” the Bull, casting around for a likely spot. “If I wanted a good view of here, I’d put the camera there.”

He pointed. Dorian turned so he was facing it, and waved. “Hi, I’m Dorian and I like men,” he said. The Bull laughed. “It’s actually  _ really dull _ , because I’m still technically fifteen and have been a bit preoccupied with the thought that my best friend might die of liver failure these past several months. If you want to know what I’ve been doing with my life, ask Gereon about our work. It’s very important, and I’m very proud of what we’ve been trying to do.” He turned back to the Bull. “Do you have anything you want them to know?”

The Bull thought about it. “Don’t listen to what the Vicuna says about kissing the lacrosse captain. Or the midfielders. Or the attackwomen. Or the goalkeeper. It’s all lies, and he’s just jealous that I got to make out with the Suni before he could get his act together and ask the guy out. And don’t listen to Gatt about- well, about anything. He’s just a little kid still, let him be. Don’t try to make Grim talk. And I don’t know if people in the Capitol bring gifts when they go visiting, but they do in Seven. Tama likes chocolate oranges. We haven’t been able to get her any in years, not even for Applefest, so if you could bring her some, that would be nice. Food in general makes a good gift. That’s- that’s all I got.”

They sat there for a moment, trying not to think that if either of them ever saw their family again, it would mean that the other was dead.

“Time for bed?” Dorian asked.

“Yeah, I think so,” the Bull replied.


	7. Day Eleven

He expected to dream about the fire. He was glad when he didn’t though.

Instead he woke up, Dorian huddled up against his side, and his head so cold that he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that his horns were covered in ice.

“Temperature’s dropping,” he said.

“No, really? I hadn’t noticed,” Dorian said. He was shivering a bit. It was on the tip of the Bull’s tongue to offer to share the sleeping bag again when he continued. “I’ve been thinking, actually. About the compass.”

“What about it?”

“It doesn’t point north,” Dorian said. “But it is pointing towards  _ something _ \- and not the Cornucopia, either. That’s to the east. It’s pointing in a sort of south-southwest direction.”

“You want to check that out today?” the Bull asked.

“Yes. We should do something today, at least.”

That was true. The excitement of yesterday’s death would only last so long before the Gamemakers would feel the need to intervene.

“It’ll probably get warmer when we’re up and moving out in the sun,” the Bull pointed out.

“Even better,” Dorian said.

He wasn’t sure that it was true, exactly. He was fine once he got the jacket on, but Dorian was clearly feeling its loss as they got underway. They took a long drink of water and refilled the jugs, and then the Bull took out his compass to guide them while Dorian took out the pouch of autumn olives they’d gathered yesterday to eat as they walked.

It was, thankfully, a boring walk. They moved along the grasslands as flat plains gave way to hills, and saw no sign of any other person at all.

There was no sign of any other kind of creature save for the wapiti either, which was a shame. It had been eleven days since the Bull had had any meat, and he was kind of craving it, but he didn’t want to take on something that was bigger than he was when he had no way to treat the wounds, and no way of preserving the meat or tanning the hide. Smaller creatures would have been nice, but he’d seen no sign of squirrels, rabbits, groundhogs, or anything of the kind, and had only heard the birds. There were wapiti, giant death birds, giant death spiders, and then there were mutts. He hadn’t even heard any insects.

This was a really strange arena. Not as weird as the one that was a maze, maybe, or the one where everyone had fought in near-total darkness save for the lights built into their arena outfits, or the one that had been entirely underground, but it was still strange. A kind of gimmick arena. Vidasala had warned him it might be like that- the Games weren’t mandated viewing in the Capitol, so they kept track of viewership as a way to determine how popular the Games were, and apparently ratings had been dropping since Zevran Arainai had won three years ago. Nothing else- no one else- could quite capture their imaginations quite like the boy from Four. The Gamemakers were getting desperate to bring people’s attention back to the current games, and they’d had enough time to plan this arena to do just that.

So they walked, the bright pink grass waving around them like water, and as time wore on and they encountered no trouble, they began to drop their guard enough to talk.

“So where’d you learn to climb if there aren’t trees in Three?”

“The jungle gym,” Dorian said.

“The jungle… what?”

“Jungle gym. It’s this ugly mess of twisted metal beams. Every time a new building is built, that borough’s jungle gym gets the scraps added to them.”

“I’m having trouble picturing that,” the Bull admitted. “You just- take metal scraps, pile them together, and then climb on them?”

“Well, the custodian welds them together first,” Dorian said. “There’s some kind of mathematical pattern to it- Felix can explain it better than I can- and there are ladders on the lower levels, for the younger kids.” He shrugged. “Generally they’re located right near the school, so we can play there during lunch. It’s how I met Felix, actually. His first day of school he ran straight there and climbed all the way to the top, and I couldn’t bear the thought of being outdone in something.”

“You started out as rivals, then?”

“We might have, if he wasn’t so  _ nice _ . When I reached the top the next day, he offered his sincere congratulations and an invitation to dinner. It jammed my transmission a bit, and before I quite knew what was happening I’d made a friend.”

His voice trailed off a little bit at the end, clearly wistful. Then he forced a smile onto his face.

“How about you? You must have friends, back in Seven.”

“Yeah, lots. I’m friends with most of the kids at the group home. Get along well with most of the kids at school too.”

“Is there a jungle gym equivalent in your village?”

“Yeah! We’ve got the old climbing tree back behind the schoolhouse,” the Bull said. “It’s this big old oak, it sits right on the bank of the stream. Someone built a treehouse in it a few years back, the little kids use it for tea parties and crap. One of the branches goes right out over the water, and there’s this knotted rope tied to it. During the summer we use that to swing out into the water. I did it once during the winter on a dare too, when I was about ten.”

“Wouldn’t the river have frozen over?” Dorian asked.

The Bull shook his head. “I mean, the sides of it were, but the water was still moving too fast in the center for it to freeze. That’s where I landed.”

“How did you get out again, if the sides were all ice?”

“Slowly. Krem and some of the other boys had to borrow some rope from the mill to help haul me out. My toes had started turning blue- and I don’t think I’ve ever seen Tama get that mad before. She walked me too and from school for a good month afterwards. Said she didn’t trust me not to get into trouble.”

She had a point. It might not feel like it at the moment, but this was definitely the worst trouble he could have gotten himself into.

They fell silent. Hopefully it was a more comfortable silence for Dorian than it was for the Bull. 

It didn’t matter much anyway. They crested over the hill they’d been climbed and stopped, staring down at the green-rimmed lake below them. It looked deep, clear and calm. It wasn’t just any one type of food that was surrounding the lake either. It was a mess of bushes, trees, and a whole bunch of flowers, and as they drew nearer the Bull could pick out a bunch of them as having edible bulbs and leaves.

“Oh, I know that one!” Dorian said, pointing at a clump of purple flowers. “It’s milk thistle.”

“Yeah,” the Bull said. He supposed it wasn’t too surprising- milk thistle would grow anywhere if you let it. “Does it pop up around Three too?”

“We grow it in our window boxes,” Dorian said. “It’s good for the liver. We mix it with Felix’s tea in the morning, he pretends not to know, we pretend not to know he knows... are these  _ all _ edible?”

“Well, don’t eat anything without checking with me first,” the Bull said.

Dorian huffed and rolled his eyes. “I’m neither an imbecile nor hungry enough to lose my wits, thanks.”

“Just making sure,” the Bull said.

Dorian kept up a running commentary as they gathered food-  _ Is that what rosehips really look like? I’ve been taking rosehips syrup for my entire life, I never imagined they would look like  _ **_that_ ** \- which pretty quickly turned into deciding what food to collect at all. There was so much more here than they could carry, let alone eat. Blueberries, fox grapes, elderberries, rosehips and tamaberries; hazelnuts, parsnips, and amaranthine artichokes; and a truly dizzying amount of leafy greens.

“Why do you think it’s called an amaranthine artichoke,” Dorian asked as they gorged themselves on a salad, “When it’s neither a type of amaranth nor an artichoke.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” the Bull said.

There were even some mint leaves to chew afterwards. His mouth felt almost clean.

They lay there for a moment, digesting, before Dorian propped himself up on his elbows. “It’s just past midday, I think. If we ran part of the way, we might be able to make it back to the rocks before nightfall.”

“Is that what you want to do?” the Bull asked.

“No,” Dorian admitted. “What I want to do is take a bath. I haven’t done more than scrub my hands in a stream and splash water here and there in- what has it been, eleven days? I don’t know about you, but I feel  _ disgusting _ .”

The Bull snorted in agreement. “I would have bathed at least twice by now, back home.”

Dorian wrinkled his nose, but didn’t say whatever it was he was thinking. It was kind of a shame, really. Dorian’s extreme reactions to the simplest things were growing on him.

“What do you think?” Dorian asked.

“Honestly?” the Bull said, looking out over the water. “I think this is a little too good to be true.”

“If you’re about to tell me that you think all of this is poisoned, I may strangle you,” Dorian said. “And then vomit on your corpse.”

The Bull laughed. “No, I don’t think that. But- this is a lot. We could last here for a long time, unless we were attacked.”

“And it would be terribly dull if we just sat here, ate well, and bathed regularly without being attacked,” Dorian said with a heavy sigh.

“Well, yeah. I mean, it wouldn’t even be a full peep show. They’d have to pixilate your ass, you’re not sixteen yet,” the Bull pointed out. At seventeen, he could flash the entire country, and probably already had.

“Presuming I’m still alive, that won’t be an issue tomorrow,” Dorian said.

“Really?” the Bull asked, surprised.

Dorian nodded.

“Well. Happy birthday,” the Bull said.

“Thanks,” Dorian said quietly. He stood, stretched with a groan, and then picked up his pack. “So- do we want to risk unknown danger here, or try to go back and risk known bird and spider danger in the process?”

The Bull opened his mouth to reply, and kept it open as he caught sight of a parachute wafting down from the sky. “Holy shit,” he said instead. “One of us got a sponsor.”

“What?” Dorian asked, wheeling around.

They watched dumbly as the parachute continued to fall until it landed on the hill behind them.

“It was rather impressive of us to make it to the final eight, I suppose,” Dorian said. “Shall we see which of us the Capitol favors?”

“I don’t think we will,” the Bull said, pointing. A second parachute had appeared, and as they watched it joined its fellow on the hill. “I think we’ve both got sponsors now.”

“Let’s not keep them waiting then,” Dorian said, and walked up the hill.

The Bull followed him, and hoped their sponsors hadn’t given them weapons to kill each other with.

“The bigger package is yours, I think,” Dorian said, pointing to the plastic-wrapped bread attached to either package. Sure enough the bigger one had a loaf of pumpernickel-rye bread, the doughs swirled together to produce a sort of tree-ring effect, and the smaller one had six of the bite-sized square rolls they ate in District Three. It was nice of their mentors to identify the packages with something that was useful. He wondered if Vidasala had come up with the idea, or if Dorian’s mentor had done it.

It wasn’t weapons. He guessed that meant that  _ someone _ in the Capitol liked listening to them shoot the shit. The Bull opened his package to find a kind of pop-up shelter, just big enough for the two of them and their gear.

“What’d you get?” the Bull asked, once he’d wrestled the shelter back down so it could fit into its bag once more.

“A message,” Dorian said, holding up a bar of soap. “We should stay.”

 

* * *

 

 

So, they stayed.

They did a little bit of scouting, and eventually decided to set the shelter up beneath an elderberry tree, whose branches were so laden with berries that they bent practically down to the ground. They cleared the ground off as best they could, lay down the sheeting, and then set the shelter up, the branches rustling a bit before settling back down over it. It mostly hid their shelter from view, and with a little mud slapped onto the sides to cut down on the reflective glare, it was practically invisible unless you knew what to look for.

Dorian celebrated by taking the last bath he could take in the arena without flashing his ass to all of Panem, with the understanding that the Bull would have his turn next.

“It’s just silly for only one of us to bathe when we’re going to be in such close proximity,” Dorian said. “It’s like eating garlic; we either both do it, or both don’t do it, it just doesn’t work otherwise.”

The opening was too good to resist. “Would that close proximity be kissing proximity?” the Bull teased.

“You should be so lucky,” Dorian retorted, but he was smiling.

So was the Bull, for that matter. It was really something, the difference a full belly could make. Everything seemed brighter, friendlier, better. He could almost forget that they were being watched, and were expected to try and kill each other before the end.

Dorian waded into the water to bathe, and came out again as soon as he was free of grime. The day had been cold- it hadn’t warmed up since daybreak at all- and the water was apparently freezing. Dorian patted himself dry with his shirt and set it out to dry on one of the bushes after he’d dressed in everything else. He zipped his jacket all the way up to his neck and huddled resentfully by the side of the lake, watching for any potential threats.

The water was cold, but not nearly as cold as the Bull had been braced for based on Dorian’s reactions.

“So, what’s the weather like in Three?” he asked.

Dorian glanced in his direction, realized that the Bull was still naked, and quickly looked up. “Um. Pretty normal, I guess? Four seasons, summers have a lot of thunderstorms and tend to run up to the low 300s, winters have a lot of snow which tends to melt into slush around the buildings, temperatures can go down to the mid 200s. One year it dipped down to 241. Autumn and spring are shorter, not as noticeable.”

“We notice them in Seven,” the Bull said. “I like spring the best. The snow melts, the birds return, and then everything starts to get warm and green.”

“Mostly we spend spring trying to determine whether or not it’s safe to turn off the radiators yet.”

Oh, right. They actually had power in Three- it was probably climate controlled in most of the buildings. Maybe that was why he didn’t really notice spring or autumn.

The Bull finished cleaning himself, and followed Dorian’s example of patting himself dry with his shirt and the laying it out to dry in the last of the sunlight. They foraged for their dinner, taking the opportunity to refill Dorian’s pouch and the container his soap had arrived in, just in case they had to run. Then they stuffed themselves again, getting their shirts and retreating back under the trees to watch the sunset.

“What are the chances that the shelter is bugged?” Dorian asked as the anthem played.

“Pretty good,” the Bull said. He would be certain, but it seemed no one had thought to place a wire on the tribute’s clothes yet. There was a chance that the Gamemakers had allowed them to receive a shelter without bugging it, but it was doubtful.

“That’s what I thought,” Dorian muttered.

The anthem stopped playing. The night was quiet.

“We don’t know what sort of predators this part of the arena will have at night,” Dorian said.

The Bull nodded. “We should sleep in shifts, then. One person keeps watch while the other sleeps.”

After a quick game of bird-water-stone -Dorian taught him, it was basically forest-river-mill, but with signs made with both hands, instead of full-bodied gestures with accompanying sound effects- it was determined that the Bull would take the first watch while Dorian slept.

“Are you going to be okay out there in just your jacket?” Dorian asked him.

The Bull shrugged. “I’ll manage.”

“Are you sure you don’t want the emergency blanket?” he asked.

“Nah, we should save that, so it’s not torn if it gets really cold.”

Dorian bit his lip and disappeared back into the shelter. A little bit of rummaging later he reappeared, and offered the Bull the parachutes their gifts had appeared on.

“I’ve noticed your jacket doesn’t have a hood,” he said. “So, maybe this will help.”

“Thanks,” the Bull said. He hadn’t been thinking of what he could use the parachutes for, exactly, when he’d packed them away. It just had seemed like a bad idea to waste anything.

“Good night, Bull,” Dorian said.

“Sleep tight,” the Bull replied. “I’ll wake you at midnight for your shift.”

It hadn’t really warmed up, that day. It wasn’t too surprising when it started dropping during the night. The Bull wrapped the smaller parachute around his head and tucked the edge into his jacket. As the night wore on, and grew colder, he wrapped the bigger one around his legs, and ate a few elderberries to make sure he had enough energy to stay awake and keep producing body heat.

It was a struggle. There was nothing happening, and even though it was beautiful there, it was so sterile and unchanging that it was kind of dull to look at; his belly was full and he could hear Dorian snoring behind him. He kind of wanted to go to sleep.

The first moon had passed its zenith and the Bull was debating whether or not to wake Dorian now or wait until the second moon had joined it when it happened. He felt a faint rumbling, he blinked, and suddenly there was an island in the middle of the lake.

He blinked. The island remained in place. He stared at it, and then all of the sudden fog swelled forth and out from the island.

“Dorian,” he hissed. “Dorian, wake up.”

Dorian snorted. “What-”

“Get ready to move!”

The fog hit just as Dorian shoved the Bull’s pack at him, rolling over them like a wave. The Bull flinched, ready for it to turn out to be corrosive or something, but it felt no different from ordinary fog. He took a little sniff, cautiously. He didn’t start to see things, or to choke as his tongue swelled.

“I think it’s safe to breathe,” he whispered.

He heard Dorian inhale next took him, and felt his hands fumble for the Bull’s.

“We should still get to higher ground,” he said.

The Bull nodded, before realizing that Dorian couldn’t see him. “Yeah.”

The climbed back up the hill that the parachutes had come down upon, leaving the fog behind.

“There’s an island,” the Bull said as they surveyed the fogbank that now covered the entire lake and most of its surroundings. “In the lake. It appeared right before the fog did.”

“I must admit, I don’t know what to make of that,” Dorian replied.

“Yeah. Me neither.”

There was a loud screech. Both Dorian and the Bull swore as they dived down, hiding themselves from view in the tall grass.

“What made that?” the Bull asked. It hadn’t sounded like the bird had- it was deeper, almost a growl. “Can you see?”

“No, I can’t-” the rest of Dorian’s complaint was lost in another screech as something burst out of the fog like a cork from a bottle of wine. Covered in silvery scales that shone brightly in the moonlight, it twisted in midair, showing off sharp talons and burnished wings.

It was beautiful. He nearly stood up to get a better look.

“Sit down!” Dorian hissed. “I will sit on you, I swear.”

“That’s a dragon,” the Bull said. “It’s really a dragon.”

The dragon straightened its neck and pushed forward. One flap of its wings, and it was almost directly above them, and then another flap, to push it past them, and then twelve more flaps before they could safely call it gone.

“I thought they were all extinct,” the Bull said.

“They may very well be,” Dorian said, sounding much less excited by it than the Bull was. “But if the Capitol had enough DNA on file to splice together a functional creature…”

His voice trailed off. The sat there in silence, watching the dragon fly farther and farther away, and then turned back to the lake. The fog had cleared. The island was still there. From this height, the Bull could tell that it was little more than a lumpy misshapen rock, clear of any vegetation or other wildlife.

“Your turn for watch,” the Bull said, as they made their way back down. “Wake me up if it comes back.”

Dorian stared at him.

“What?” the Bull asked.

“You do realize that it probably wants to kill us, right?” Dorian asked.

“Well, yeah. But it’s a  _ dragon _ .”

Dorian sighed. “Fine, I’ll wake you. Just do try to ensure that my birthday isn’t also your funeral, please?”

“Will do.”

The Bull handed over the parachutes once he reached the shelter, and his jacket as well.

“It’s gotten very cold,” Dorian protested. “The sleeping bag might not be enough.”

“Then your jacket definitely won’t be enough for you.”

“The point is that I  _ not _ sleep,” Dorian pointed out.

“Doesn’t mean you have to freeze,” the Bull replied.

Dorian took the jacket and the smaller parachute, insisting that the Bull keep the larger one just in case. The sleeping bag was still warm with Dorian’s body heat when the Bull slipped inside. He was asleep within moments.


	8. Day Twelve

Dorian did wake him up when the dragon returned. Or, well: Dorian woke him up when the fog started rolling out from the island, and handed his jacket back.

The temperature was still frigid, and Dorian was shivering as they climbed the hill. They settled into the grass on the hill just above the fog, and waited.

It wasn’t long before the dragon returned, clutching a dead wapiti in each foreleg. They watched it dive down into the fog above where the island was, and then watched the fog gradually disappear. Once it was clear again, there was no sign of either the dragon or the island.

“Well. That’s… strange,” Dorian remarked.

The Bull nodded. “Hey, Dorian.”

“Bull?”

“Happy birthday!”

“Ha!” Dorian said. “I don’t suppose you’ve gotten me some sunshine and mild weather?”

“No, but if we go back downhill I can probably get you some berries.”

“An acceptable present, considering the circumstances,” Dorian retorted.

They are breakfast as the sun rose. Things got a little bit warmer, but not quite so warm as to stop their breath from being visible.

“So, it’s occurred to me that this place- or at least the dragon island- might be what the compass points to,” Dorian said as he sealed their jugs back up after refilling them and adding the iodine.

“Want to take a walk around the lake, check that out?” the Bull asked.

Dorian nodded. “We should be careful, though. If this is where it points… well. I would be very surprised to learn that the Gamemakers only put one compass into the arena. We may not be the first ones to find this place.”

“Even if we are, then we’ll probably have company sooner rather than later,” the Bull pointed out. “Though we could use that to our advantage, set up some traps or something.”

“We could dig a pit, I suppose,” Dorian mused. “Line the bottom with sharpened sticks, cover the top over with sod, like we did with the rocks.”

“We could light a fire,” the Bull said. “The smoke would draw the Careers to us.”

“That- might actually work,” Dorian said, glancing down at the pouch with the two remaining grenades. “So long as they were still enough, close enough- I might be able to catch all four of them. And then-”

And then, four more dead kids later, their alliance would be over.

“One step at a time,” the Bull told him. “Let’s walk the perimeter first.”

After a little while they decided to leave most of their food in their shelter. It was safely camouflaged, there weren’t any creatures to get into it and steal their supplies, and they were surrounded by edibles even if they did get cut off from their shelter somehow. They could use the extra pack space for anything they found on the way- and even if they didn’t find anything they wanted to eat, he still wanted to bring back some branches that didn’t have food attached to them to burn. The Bull took care to take a branch they’d already picked clean of berries and rub out their prints leading up from the lake shore, just in case.

They took a walk around it counterclockwise. By the time they reached the far side of it, they’d determined that the dragon island was what the compass was pointing to. They’d also found a lot of food.

A lot, a lot. Some of it even Dorian recognized.

The Bull found himself thinking as they walked that it was a shame that they couldn’t just stay here. The sod had been thick and durable enough to keep its shape over the hole in the rocks, then they could probably turn it into some kind brick. They could build a smokehouse, roast the nuts, parch the roots, made even preserve some meat if he could bag a wapiti. They could boil up the acorns he could see, use the leftover water to tan the wapiti hide, and grind the boiled nuts up for flour. They could make an actual house instead of sleeping in the shelter, and-

-and this was a really dumb thing for him to think, for a whole lot of reasons.

“Bull? Do you see something?” Dorian asked quietly.

The Bull shook his head. “Nah. Just more woolgathering. Come on, we can do without the acorns for now, just gather some branches.”

“Aren’t acorns poisonous?” Dorian asked absently, startling a laugh out of him.

He was still grumpy about that as they made their way back down the other side of the lake _ \- How am I supposed to know how to make acorns edible? Do you know how many trees there are in Three? There are sixty-nine trees in the entire district. We’ve given them all names like Horace and Calliope, Bull! _ \- but he kept his muttering under his breath, and they both kept a sharp eye out for any signs of life. There weren’t any. They were the first of the tributes to follow the compass, it seemed.

“It’s possible that the other tributes either didn’t manage to pick up anything at the Cornucopia with a compass in it, or else they’re busy enough to ignore it.”

The Bull nodded. “They’ll come if they see smoke. We should get started then.” What else could they do?

They’d been eating as they walked around the lake, and still had food tucked away in their pockets. They didn’t do more than make sure their jugs were filled, and then got to work.

Dorian cut away at the sod, exposing the dirt for the Bull to dig. They needed the hole to be big enough that the Careers wouldn’t be able to get right back up again, even if they weren’t injured on the wooden stakes Dorian was sharpening as the Bull dug.

“We’re going to have to cart this dirt away somehow, before we spring our trap.”

Dorian winced. The dirt pile was already pretty sizeable. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He ended up making a kind of pouch with the larger parachute to carry the dirt over to the lake. It mostly worked. It worked well enough that the Bull didn’t think it was going to give away their plan.

He’d made the hole as wide as he felt he could and was about knee-deep when the earthquake started.

“ _ Vashedan _ !” the Bull swore, as the remainder of the dirt pile collapsed back into the hole. Dorian came sprinting forwards, and behind him the lakeside shook with falling fruits, nuts, and berries.

It didn’t last very long. The Bull waved off Dorian’s offered hand and pulled himself out of the hole.

“There might be aftershocks,” the Bull told him. “There are in real earthquakes sometimes, at least.”

Dorian nodded. “Is there something we should do? I know that in buildings, you’re supposed to duck and cover beneath a table or suchlike.”

“Just staying out in the open should be enough,” the Bull said. “So long as we’re where no trees can fall on us, we should be safe enough.”

They sat there on the meadow for a while, but there were no aftershocks.

“Back to work, then?” Dorian asked.

“We should check the shelter first,” the Bull pointed out.

They did. Some of their food has scattered all over the shelter floor and the elderberry branches were no longer bowed over enough to cover it entirely, but otherwise it was unharmed.

“And now back to work,” Dorian said with a sigh. They turned back to the hole just in time to see two parachutes land in it.

“We’ve become quite popular, haven’t we?” Dorian asked, smiling.

“I guess the Careers are having a really shit time of it,” the Bull observed.

The packaged were almost identical, except for the size. A pair of warm socks, a lot thicker and longer than the ones they’d gotten in the Launch Room. A long, thin piece of something really warm, that could be bunched together as a scarf or worn like a shawl or a blanket. A pair of gloves, with grips on the fingers and palms. The noise Dorian made when he saw those was practically a sex noise.

The Bull frowned. “Why would they give us these?” he asked.

“Why would-  _ why _ ?” Dorian spluttered. “Because it’s freezing, Bull!”

“It’s really not,” the Bull said, looking back towards the lake. The lake itself wasn’t showing any sign of ice or anything sinister. The sky beyond it, on the other hand…

“Oh,  _ kaffas _ ,” Dorian snarled at the approaching storm clouds. “Can’t they give us a break?”

“Apparently not,” the Bull said. “Come on, let’s get this as done as well can.”

The Bull dug. Dorian laid out the two new parachutes along with the one he’d been using before, and the Bull shoveled the dirt onto two of them, while Dorian carted the third to the lake. They worked steadily, until the snow began to fall thick and fast enough that the Bull wasn’t shoveling dirt so much as he was shoveling snow.

“You’re going to have to be quick to take them out,” the Bull said as he drove the stakes into the bottom of the pit.

“Have I ever not been quick?” Dorian replied, which was a fair point.

They covered the hole with sod and a hope that the snow wouldn’t cause it to collapse, and then beat all much dirt out of the parachutes as they could. Night had fallen by then, and the snow was falling thick and fast as the anthem played.

“Let’s go,” the Bull said. The parachutes weren’t going to get any cleaner. “Your footsies must be freezing.”

In reply, Dorian pointed up and behind him. The Bull turned around, and saw the face of the girl from Ten staring down at the arena through the snow before disappearing.

“The earthquake must have covered the sound of the cannons,” Dorian said. He could barely get the words out, his teeth were chattering so hard.

“Yeah,” the Bull said, ushering him back towards the shelter.

They crawled inside and took off their boots. The Bull knocked the snow off to them just outside the shelter, which was covered by the elderberries, branches bent and crossing under the weight of the snow. Behind him, Dorian pulled the new pair of socks on over his old one and the bottoms of his pants, still shivering violently.

“I thought it would be warmer in here!” he hissed.

“It’ll warm up once we’re inside for a while.”

The inside of the shelter was reflective, like the emergency blanket was reflective. Once they’d expended enough body heat, it would probably warm up.

Probably. Hopefully.

“We should eat,” the Bull said.

Dorian nodded. They ate the bread they’d been given yesterday- the Bull tore his loaf in half and Dorian gave him three of his rolls- and some of the greens they’d gathered. They drank a little water, and then sat there.

“They won’t be able to see the smoke in all of this,” the Bull pointed out, after a while. “We’re going to have to wait until the snow stops before trying to lure them here.”

“Yes. The thought had occurred to me as well.” He paused for a moment, and then asked. “So. We’re down to seven tributes. The four Careers, the two of us, and…”

“The boy from Twelve,” the Bull replied.

“The twelve-year-old?” Dorian asked. For a moment he looked horrified, and then he schooled his features. “Well. Good on him for lasting this long, I guess.”

The Bull wondered if the twelve-year-old was who this storm was targeting. The Careers would still have their supplies from the Cornucopia, and that must have included winter gear. He and Dorian had this shelter and their sleeping bag. What did the kid have, aside from whatever luck had allowed him to survive this long? He probably didn’t even have sponsors.

“It might be better, this way.” This way, there was no chance that the Gamemakers would try to manipulate them into killing the kid. How did anyone ever go home again after killing a twelve-year-old?

“They say freezing to death is a relatively painless way to go,” Dorian mused. “Though I’m having difficulty believing it at present. I don’t suppose your offer of sharing the sleeping bag is still open?”

“Yeah, of course it is,” the Bull said. “Though, we’re going to need to figure out how we’re going to piss while it’s snowing first.”

Dorian’s answering groan was pure disgust.

In the end they chose the little apple grove that was about a ten meter sprint from their shelter. The branches had bent over and intertwined enough that they weren’t being snowed on very much, and they could pick tomorrow’s breakfast on the way back.

“I can’t help but feel this is unsanitary,” Dorian muttered once they were back inside.

“We’ll scrub them off when we get back to the tent,” the Bull said.

They did the best they could with a fistful of snow in one of the parachutes, but it refused to melt. Dorian checked their water jugs, and found a film of ice had formed over the top.

“We can always suck on the ice,” the Bull pointed out. “The water will still be water whether it’s melted outside our mouths or not.”

“That doesn’t solve the question of how we’re going to purify it if-” Dorian cut himself off. “Never mind. We’ll just have to be careful, I suppose.”

Or maybe the snow storm was for them, instead of the kid. Maybe it was to keep them in close proximity with dwindling supplies until they snapped and turned on one another.

Well. The Bull had no intention of letting that happen. The Careers would kill them, probably, but he wasn’t going to hurt Dorian, and he didn’t think Dorian would hurt him either. Not like the Gamemakers wanted them to hurt each other, at least.

“So, how do you want to arrange this?” the Bull asked, pointing down to the sleeping bag. It was pretty big, as far as sleeping bags went- it had to be, for him to sleep in it- but it was still designed for one person, and Dorian wasn’t exactly small.

They’d both lost weight, though, and it wasn’t like snuggling together was a bad idea in this weather.

“Hm. Well, unless I’m very much mistaken, you can’t sleep on your side with those horns,” Dorian said. The Bull nodded, and Dorian continued. “And we can’t both fit laying side by side. And you’d probably crush me-”

“Hey!” the Bull said, mock-offended. “I’d be careful.”

“You’d be asleep, ideally,” Dorian pointed out. “Which I suppose means that I’ll be on top.”

The Bull smirked. Dorian didn’t notice, too busy trying to unzip his jacket to pay much attention to the Bull’s face.

“You should unzip too, Bull,” Dorian said.

“Bossy,” the Bull said, and that made Dorian look at him. “Is that why you want to be on top? Do you like being in charge?”

Dorian stared at him, cycling through a number of facial expressions that would be even funnier without the goggles. “I despair of you sometimes,” he said, finally pulling his zipper free. The Bull followed suit, waiting.

“Well,” Dorian said impatiently. “Get in, it’s literally freezing in here!”

“Hold on a sec.”

The Bull pulled out Dorian’s emergency blanket, and left it out. He would pull it over them once they were actually in a position to fall asleep.

The Bull got in. Dorian crawled in on top of him, huffed, and said “This isn’t going to work. Can you sit up a bit?”

The Bull sat back up. Dorian fumbled for a bit, and then zipped their jackets together on one side.

“Huh,” he said.

“What, do they not do this in Seven?” Dorian asked. He wriggled a bit and pulled his arm free of the side he’d already zippered.

The Bull followed suit. “Most of our coats have buttons. Why were you doing this in Three?”

“Our school’s headmaster has this idea in his head that we do better if we have half an hour outside- no matter what the weather was like. Unless it was bad enough to cancel school altogether, out we were marched and we were not allowed back inside until the allotted thirty minutes was up.” Dorian zippered the other side, and then fumbled his other arm free of its sleeve. “Someone figured out that you could zipper your jackets together and share body heat, so we’d just try and find a windbreak to huddle behind and wait for our time to be up. Now try laying back down.”

It was kind of awkward. The Bull had to force his arms out of the top of their jackets for balance. It was impossible to pull the sleeping back up higher than Dorian’s face without smothering him. Between the two of them they managed to fumble the scarves they’d been given to cover the Bull’s chest and head, and then the Bull tugged the emergency blanket over them both, wincing at the loud noise that caused.

And then there was the matter of the mechanics of fitting their bodies together. The Bull had a system worked out with Vasaad, who he normally shared with, and Krem and Gatt too, when winter rolled around and everyone piled into as few hammocks as possible. Dorian fell between Krem and Vasaad in terms of size, and also apparently had no idea how to share a sleeping space at all.

“They don’t really share beds in Three, do they?” the Bull asked after a round of Dorian’s shifting nearly resulted in him kneeling him in the groin.

“I suppose some people must- poorer families with more kids. I never have, though,” Dorian said. “I had my own room at my parent’s place- I think Mother might sleep there now- and at the Alexius’ Felix and I had bunk beds.”

“Oh yeah. Were you on top then too?”

Dorian huffed, but still replied. “I have been of late. Normally that’s Felix’s spot, but that’s become something of an impossibility since the fever. I suppose you all sleep in one gigantic nest of blankets on the floor or something?”

“Or something. We have hammocks. Generally it’s two a piece, but when winter rolls around it tends to be more like four or five a piece.”

“Well, you’re the expert, then,” Dorian said. “Guide me.”

The Bull grabbed him around the middle, and pulled him so that he was only half on top of the Bull, cuddled against his side with an arm and a leg thrown over the Bull’s torso, one of the Bull’s arms wrapped around him in return.

“Comfy?” he asked innocently.

“More or less,” Dorian said. He wriggled against the Bull for a little bit, crinkling the emergency blanket again, before settling. “Good night, Bull.”

“Good night, Dorian.”


	9. Day Thirteen

The Bull was woken up in the early part of the following morning by a cacophony of roars and screeches. Dorian snorted himself awake, and for a moment they lay there, hearts hammering.

“It’s close, but I don’t think it’s directly on our doorstep,” Dorian said cautiously. “I don't think it's even about us at all- listen, it's moving farther away.”

“I’m going to check it out anyway,” the Bull said. A little more fumbling, and they’d unzipped their jackets again. The Bull jammed on his boots and gloves, wrapped a scarf around his head, and then picked the goggles and his axe back up before heading outside.

He could barely see at all at first. The goggles were no help- the problem wasn’t the darkness so much as it was the snow and the fog. But the fog was receding, and once it had returned to the lake, the Bull could make out shapes.

One of them was the dragon. The other was… not a dragon.

“Uh, Dorian? I think you’re going to want to see this.”

Dorian appeared a moment later, wearing his scarf around his shoulders like a cape, his grenade pouch clutched tightly in one hand.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“Some kind of ice giant, maybe?” the Bull said.

He wasn’t sure what else to call it. It was ice-blue, and it looked kind of like a giant human until you saw its face. Between the snow and the weird contrast the goggles threw everything into the Bull wasn’t entirely sure what its face looked like, but he kind of got the impression that it was a kind of tusked squid.

“Whatever it is, it’s badass!” he declared as the dragon took another swipe at the ice giant, severing one of its tentacles.

Dorian turned to stare at him. “You are far too pleased about this.”

“It’s a giant fighting a dragon. How would you describe it?” the Bull asked.

“Ideally far away from me,” Dorian replied. “I would also accept the certainty that neither of them could hear, smell, see or subsequently eat us.”

“You don’t think this is a little magnificent. Just a little?” the Bull pressed. The giant tried to savage the dragon with its tusks, drawing blood from its side. “I mean, they’re ripping themselves to shreds. Even if one of them wins, the other’s going to be injured pretty badly.”

“That doesn’t mean we can take either one of them,” Dorian said.

“Aren’t injured creatures supposed to be more ferocious? I’m sure I’ve read something to that effect.”

“Yeah, but what a way to go. Fighting a dragon… no one’s tried to do that since before the Dark Days.”

“I’d prefer to expend my energy on fights I might actually be able to win,” Dorian said.

“We’re both kind of in the wrong place for that,” the Bull said, before he could really think the words through.

Dorian was silent for a moment.

“Well. It was this or not fight at all. And as Felix has been so quick to tell me in that last month or so, there are things worse than dying. Just- is this really what you’d want to make your last stand on?”

He turned and went back into the shelter before the Bull could come up with a response. When he turned back to the hill, the fight had ended, and the dragon was chasing the ice giant out of its territory.

He went back inside. Dorian had taken off his boots and curled up at the foot of the sleeping bag, his knees hugged to his chest.

“We haven’t ever discussed volunteering,” Dorian said.

“No, we haven’t.”

He took off his boots, knocked the snow free of the treads. He was probably going to have to shovel them a path, at the rate the snow was falling. He closed the entrance back up, and then during back to Dorian, who had uncurled a little bit.

“Well?” Dorian asked.

“He’s called the Vicuna,” the Bull said as he settled down next to Dorian. “Another of the kids from my group home. We’re the same age- we sleep in the same hammock, we’re in the same grade at school, we work in the same debarking station at the mill. He’s like a brother to me. And he was reaped, so I took his place.”

“Felix was reaped,” Dorian said. “I presume you’ve guessed as much. So, we’re on the same floor, minus a few minor details.”

“Yeah.” Neither one of them were here because they thought they could win. They were here because they didn’t want to lose someone else.

“He wouldn’t have made it past the bloodbath,” the Bull said. “Not because he wouldn’t have fought, but because he would have tried to fight them all.”

“Felix wouldn’t have lasted that long, I think,” Dorian said. “He’d have said something meaningful, something poignant and then stepped off the pedestal before the countdown had run down. Let himself be blown to bits on his own terms, instead of hacked to bits by one of the Careers or some mutt.”

No one had actually done that before. Not on purpose, anyway. Not in any way that might be proved to be a willful act. Tokens were dropped, kids in poor health wobbled and fell, but no one announced their suicide and then actually went through with it. Now that he was thinking about it, he wasn’t sure why.

“So. If not fighting dragons, what would you like to die doing?” the Bull asked.

“Taking the Careers out with me, of course,” Dorian replied. “If nothing else, I should like the comfort of knowing that this year doesn’t end in victory for one of them again.”

“Yeah. Also, if they survive, they’ll just move on to hunting down the twelve-year-old.”

Dorian inhaled sharply. “That too.”

They sat there for a moment, side by side, staring ahead past the shelter wall and into whatever future they had left.

“Stick to the plan then?” Dorian asked. “Wait until the snow clears up, make a fire, and then…”

“Unless something better comes up, yeah. That’s the plan.”

“And you’re not going to go off fighting dragons as a ‘something better’, are you?” Dorian asked.

“Well, I don’t know. I’m not going pick a fight with the dragon, sure, but what if it picks a fight with me?”

“Then you run away, you-” Dorian cut himself off when he saw the smirk on the Bull’s face. “Oh, sod off.”

“Nah, I don’t think so. I mean, you just stopped being jailbait yesterday, I think sodomy’s moving a little fast, don’t you?”

“You’re only a year old than I am, and also, that was not a literal suggestion!”

“Well, what else are we going to do to pass the time?”

He’d meant it to tease, but once the words left his mouth they fell flat and heavy between them. They both knew that the Capitol got a real kick out of kids hooking up in the arena. They loved it when they were both of age and they could show it on TV during the schooltime recap. They loved it when one of the lovers died and the other went on a rampage in revenge, and they really loved it when it ended in one kid’s hands around the other’s throat, or an embrace turned into a knife between the ribs.

Maybe that's why there was this snowstorm, and this shelter. Their sponsors- the ones from the Capitol more than anyone from their homes- wanted to watch them fuck before they tried to kill one another.

Well, tough luck for them. He wanted no part in that.

After a minute, Dorian lifted his chin and replied. “Eat breakfast, for one thing.”

It was a slow day for them again. It couldn’t be anything else. The snow continued to fall. The Bull spent some time shoveling it away from the entrance, piling it up along the sides of the shelter to support the elderberry branches that were covering the shelter and growing ever heavier with snow. Dorian grumbled, but eventually came out with him to pick the elderberries from those branches before the snow made them inaccessible.

They were sticking mostly to fruit. The juice would help make up for their water troubles, or so they hoped. The Bull’s canteen was relatively easy to refill with snow, and the filter built into the mouth had served him well enough those first few days in the arena, but their jugs were in trouble. As the ice expanded it threatened to burst the jugs open, and the only source of heat they had to melt it was their bodies. They put the jugs between them, and paused every so often to drink whatever had melted. It was a slow process, and didn’t yield much in the way of water. Hopefully, it would be enough to keep the jugs intact.

Mostly though, they just talked that day. Not about anything serious- they’d done about as much of that as they could handle already. But they talked about better times, what life was like in Three and Seven when things were going pretty okay.

School was the most obvious difference. There weren’t any summer half-days or winter vacations in Three. Kids just trucked into and out of school six days a week year-round, save for Capitol-mandated holidays and four three-day vacations to allow teachers to finish grading everyone’s end-of-term exams. Education became compulsory at the age of five across all of the districts, but it almost always started younger in Three. Unless you were the poorest of the poor, you sent your kid to a half-day program at a ‘pre-school’ starting at the age of three. Richer kids, like Dorian, went to the most expensive and prestigious of these pre-schools, and then came home to be tutored even more. By the time Dorian stepped foot into the Capitol school system, he could read, write, and do simple arithmetic, and he could do it much better than any of the other first-formers.

“Worse, I could argue. Father spared no expense when it came to teaching me oration. I learned logical reasoning, appealing to emotion, even diction. Especially diction. I used to have to run through every single speech the President ever gave, make sure I was using the correct accent.”

“What difference does that make?”

“Well, when you ask the Capitol for funds, you can’t use their accent, because it makes them think you’ve got ideas above your station,” Dorian explained, his hands moving lazily through the air in front of them. It wasn’t so cold that they were back into the sleeping bag, but it was cold enough that they were huddled together, scarf-blankets wrapped around them , emergency blanket draped over their legs, and jackets zippered up tight. His fingers kept brushing up against the Bull’s leg as he spoke. “But no one will take you seriously if you sound like you just popped in from the factory floor, so you can’t speak like most people in Three do. So the inventor class all has this cobbled-together accent that’s got one foot in either locality. That way you don’t sound like a threat and you don’t sound like someone who does things for a living.”

The first story that came to the Bull’s mind to reply with was Gatt’s. He’d come in on a train, smuggled on board and then given over to Tama when he was discovered. It wasn’t common, but it wasn’t unheard of either: Stitches, they were pretty sure, had come from Eleven in a shipment of cucumbers when he was a baby, and Krem had stowed away on a shipment of clothing from Eight at the age of seven, and would never say why, had only ever whispered that there was nothing left for him there. Gatt had come in with the tesserae grain when he was about three, not saying a word and confusing everyone, because the tesserae grain had come straight from the Capitol. Why would anyone from the Capitol want their kid to be raised in the districts, let alone go through all the risk of smuggling them out on a train?

They’d just about decided that he must have been smuggled on board during a fuel stop somewhere else in Seven when a passing Peacekeeper made a joke to the effect of double checking that he still had his tongue.

“I’m not a stupid Avox,” Gatt had said, in a pitch-perfect Capitol accent. The Peacekeeper was so shocked that he let Gatt toddle off unreprimanded. It took them months to get him to say another word.

That wasn’t the sort of thing he should say where the Capitol could hear them, though. He wasn’t sure that any of that was legal, for one thing.

“So, how long are your school days?” the Bull asked, changing the topic instead. “Mine are six hours, plus a four hour shift elsewhere once you hit reaping age, unless you’re really smart. Dalish does this correspondence course- arboreal sciences.”

“Mine are also six hours. I don’t actually know what the work shifts are like for factories and shops, but apprenticeships with inventors are supposed to last another six hours, maximum. It didn’t really work out with Gereon and I. Six hours would become seven would become eight would become sleeping on their couch eventually became sleeping on the bunk bed in Felix’s room with a drawer for my spare clothes. Livia’s apprentices had a more normal time of it, I think. We saw them at supper, when we were home for supper, and then they always went back home to their families afterwards.”

“She have a lot of apprentices?” the Bull asked.

“Loads. Generally no less than six at a time. That’s not typical- neither is only having one. But virology isn’t exactly something you want loads of people around for, and apparently the opposite is true of computer programming.”

“Huh,” the Bull said. “What made you decide on virology?”

“Honestly? I liked Gereon. I had the grades to pursue just about anything, and the family connections to have my bid accepted by just about everyone, but when it came time to ask around, I found that most potential mentors either wanted me to be their sycophant or the chance to be my father’s sycophant. With Gereon I actually felt like he might have something to teach me. Also, he’s Felix’s father. That was a big point in his favor.”

“I’ll bet.” If Vasaad or Krem or Gatt had had family in town instead of being from the group home, he’d probably have tried to stick close to them too.

“What made you decide to work in the saw mill?” Dorian asked. “Did you decide to work in the sawmill, or was it just sort of expected?”

“It’s expected, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t my choice. I could have done something else,” the Bull told him. “But I didn’t want to. I mean, almost everyone works at the sawmill at one point or another, even if it’s just six hour overnight shifts three nights a week during the busy season. The logging camps come to trade at the sawmill. It’s the beating heart of my village.” If you wanted to know anything about what was going on while it was still happening- changes in the Peacekeepers, approaching logging camps, illegal stills, attempts to rig the preliminary Reaping, the price of rabbit on the black market- then you needed to be in the sawmill.

“What’s your village called?” Dorian asked. “I don’t think you’ve said.”

“It’s Milltown 7G-4,” the Bull replied.

Dorian twisted around to better stare at him.

“Hey, you’ve got to keep it simple,” the Bull told him. “Otherwise the Capitol might forget about us.”

“Ha!” Dorian said. Whatever else he was going to say was lost, as outside the anthem began to play.

The Bull went outside. Dorian followed.

It was still snowing. They could barely see the Capitol seal in between the snow.

“It doesn’t look like we missed anyone,” Dorian said, squinting dubiously up at the sky. A snowflake caught in his eyelashes, before melting and being blinked away.

“Yeah, I think we’re still at seven,” the Bull said. “Dinner, piss, and sleep?”

“We might as well.”

Sleeping together was less awkward that night that it had been the night before. The Bull knew about Dorian’s trick with the jackets, and Dorian knew that he shouldn’t try to sleep directly on top of him. They wrapped the Bull’s head and upper torso up in the scarves, and Dorian stuck his arm back through his sleeve and folded it across the Bull’s chest as an extra layer of padding.

“They really should have given you something for your head,” Dorian said. “Even if a hood wouldn’t fit your horns they still could have provided some kind of- of oversized handkerchief or something.”

“They could have just sprung for a hood,” the Bull said.

“There are hoods for qunari?” Dorian asked.

“Yeah. They’re got a kind of flappy-fringe thing at the sides for your horns to stick out of, and generally the front has some kind of heavy stone or something sewn into it, to keep it from falling off, but. It’s still a hood.”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen a qunari with a hood,” Dorian said. “Not even last year, in the ice arena.”

Yeah. None of the qunari had made it that year, not even the one from Two.

“Eh, if the horns were that big a problem, we wouldn’t bother with shirts either.”

“If you’d been running around shirtless this entire time, then you would probably have gotten a sponsor before we’d met.”

There was a long moment of silence in which Dorian lay there, stiff as a board with his face burning so hotly that the Bull could feel it, and the Bull tried very hard not to laugh.

“Let’spretendIdidn’tsaythat,” Dorian muttered.

“I don’t know, maybe we should talk about this,” he said, ignoring Dorian’s groan. “Just what were you picturing here? I mean, I assume you were thinking warmer weather.”

Dorian grunted, and tried to cover the Bull’s mouth with his hand.

The Bull kept right on talking. “You were thinking of the July picture for the district calendars, weren’t you? Be honest now- was I wearing suspenders?” He dropped his voice a little. “Did I have a massive axe?”

“Why are you making this so hard?” Dorian cried.

The Bull sniggered.

“For the love of- that’s not what I meant!” Dorian said. His voice broke, and he tried again. “This isn’t what I meant.”

Right. They were supposed to kill each other, eventually, if nothing else did it first. That punched the mirth right out of him.

“You’re right,” the Bull apologized. “I’m sorry.”

After a moment, Dorian slumped back down, burying his face in the Bull’s chest.

“It’s- it might stop snowing, tomorrow,” he said, trying to soothe. “And then we can handle the Careers.”

Dorian nodded jerkily. His hood had fallen off. Bereft of anything better to do he tugged it back over Dorian’s head.

“Try to get some sleep,” he suggested.

“Right. You too,” Dorian replied.

Eventually, they fell asleep.


	10. Day Fourteen

The Bull dreamed again.

He was in Three- they both were in Three, he and Dorian. They were on a roof, overlooking row upon row of concrete buildings, and two trees. They both looked like the climbing tree back home, but somehow, he knew Dorian had pointed them out as being Horace and Calliope.

Dorian was sitting. The Bull had his head in his lap, his horns framing Dorian’s midriff.

“This is impossible, you know,” Dorian said. “I can’t return here unless you’re dead, and you can’t ever come here at all if I’m still alive.”

“I wouldn’t want to come here if you didn’t still call this place home,” the Bull said.

“If you lived, they would make you come here for the Victory Tour,” Dorian pointed out. The Bull grunted in acknowledgement. “Does that mean you’ve decided that I should survive?”

The scene shifted so suddenly that for a moment, the Bull was sure they’d left the roof entirely. Smoke was everywhere, choking him and making his eyes water, the crackle and heat of flames immense and too damn close.

For some reason, he could still see Dorian clearly, sitting calmly on the ledge just to the right of him. And he could hear from below him Tama’s desperate screaming: “Ashkaari!  _ Ashkaari _ !”

“If you don’t choose,” Dorian said urgently. “They’ll only take us both.”

There was a loud crack, and the roof’s door split open, revealing a hundred skeletal arms of flame, reaching towards them.

“Say the word and I’ll jump,” Dorian said.

Below them, Tama continued to call for him. “Ashkaari! Ashkaari, please jump, please, we need you-”

But the time to choose had passed. One of the hands closed around his ankle and pain seared up his leg, another reached for Dorian, grabbing him by the elbow and Dorian screamed-

And the Bull sat bolt upright, a scream caught in his throat. Or, at least, he  _ tried _ to sit bolt upright. The sleeping bag made that difficult, as did Dorian, who let out an indignant squawk as he woke.

“Bull, what-”

The scream was still in his throat, and if he opened his mouth it would come out. He managed, without unclenching his teeth, to make a sound that was more a grunt than a whimper.

“Nightmare?” Dorian asked, quietly enough that the bugs probably couldn’t pick it up.

The Bull nodded tightly. Dorian shifted, straddling his legs and winding his arms around the Bull, one hand at the small of his back and the other at the back of his neck. The Bull let his head drop onto his shoulder, careful to keep his horns from hitting Dorian’s head.

“I don’t know how it’s done in Seven, but in Three when someone dies there’s this ceremony. People come to say their goodbyes, and anything else they wanted to say to the deceased. They bring food and whatever else they think might comfort the deceased’s survivors, and then, after everyone has come and gone, and the undertaker takes her body. You get an urn back later, to place on your bookshelf for a year and then deposit in the family crypt.” Dorian was still whispering, so quietly that it seemed like the Bull more felt his words than heard them, like the dry rasp of chapped lips against his cheek. “When Livia died- Gereon should have overseen the necessities, but Felix was still deathly ill. I did it. And when it was over and we were finally no longer sharing an apartment with a corpse, I found him in our room, just sort of cradling Felix. I ask him what he was doing- demanded to know, I was quite short with him, actually- and he told me that he was holding Felix’s soul in. I don’t know why, but for months afterwards I had terrible nightmares about that moment. Either Felix’s soul would start slithering away and I’d be too slow to catch it, or his body would just sort of dissolve into a pile of bloody entrails.”

“It’s not the same in Seven,” the Bull said. The words tumbled out of him in a rush, but at least he wasn’t screaming. “We burn the bodies, but. They’re just husks. No urn, no marker: we just scatter the ashes to the wind. It’s- everything gets handed down in Seven. Some other kid gets your boots, your hammock space, your toys… and then they get your stories. Who you were, what you did. It’s a way of saying goodbye, and a way to keep your memory alive.” They couldn’t really do that, after the fire. The only thing left were memories he didn’t want to share with anyone, even if they already remembered the same thing.

“There’s no chance that the Capitol really cares about how the districts do funerals, is there?” Dorian asked.

“Probably not.” He wasn’t worried. The body wasn’t the important part. Even if the Capitol decided to stuff it and stick it in a museum, Tama and the other kids would be able to do everything they needed to do. “Is it morning yet?”

“I think the dragon’s still out,” Dorian replied, grumbling when the Bull leaned back and opened the entrance just wide enough to check. Sure enough, there was no fog but he could kind of make out the island in the lake, now frozen over and coated with snow, which was continuing to fall.

“You’re letting out the little bit of warmth we have!” Dorian protested.

The Bull shut the entrance back up again and then lay back down, bringing Dorian with him. “We might as well go back to sleep.”

Dorian nodded, and slipped off to the side. One of his hands moved, tucking the scarves in around the Bull’s shoulders, and smoothing them out across his chest.

The Bull didn’t fall asleep again, not really. But he did doze a little, soothed by Dorian’s weight and the lazy patterns he drew on his chest with his fingertips.

They stopped pretending they were going to get more sleep when they heard the dragon return.

“It’s still snowing, isn’t it?” Dorian asked.

“It was before,” the Bull said, stretching a bit. He and Dorian disentangled themselves and dressed for outside.

Sure enough, it was still snowing.

It seemed like they were in for another slow day, at first. The Bull shoveled another path, and shored up the sides of their shelter. Dorian went out and picked some of the fruits and berries he knew were safe. Their water jugs were beginning to thaw out again, enough that the Bull no longer worried that they would burst, even if they were still mostly ice.

They spent the morning playing, the sort of verbal schoolyard games that everyone played, more or less. “How’s yours?” from Seven didn’t really work very well with two people; same for “Twenty-One” from Three. “Would You Rather?” they both knew, and agreed didn’t seem very appealing under the circumstances, and they were both kind of sick of talking about themselves, which ruled out “Two Truths and A Lie”.

Dorian got hilariously into “I Went To Market” though.

“I went to market,” the Bull said, trying very hard not to laugh. “And I bought an apple, a circuit breaker, a jug of water, a tub of ice cream, a sleeping bag, a little creativity, a pair of boots, some originality, a pair of gloves, a cheat sheet, a backpack, your-” A little giggle escape him.

“That’s a loss!” Dorian crowed. “You’ve stopped, and therefore you lose!”

“Tama’s nightgown,” the Bull continued, as though he hadn’t spoken. “A canteen, the plague, a jacket, Mr. July, an interrupting inventor-”

“You’ve already lost!” Dorian reminded him.

“-some common decency-”

“ _ You have already lost _ ,” Dorian repeated.

“And some oil,” the Bull finished, adding in his most seductive tone. “For intimate use.”

Dorian gave him a look of pure outrage, and the Bull laughed again.

“I’m going out,” Dorian declared, still sneering as he put on his boots.

“Does this mean you’re forfeiting?” the Bull asked innocently, once he’d gotten his breath back.

Dorian paused in the act of opening the shelter and shot the Bull a dirty glare over his shoulder. “I’m not forfeiting, because  _ you have already lost _ ,” he snapped, and stomped off.

The Bull chuckled, and took advantage of the increased legroom to stretch a little bit. His spine had just cracked in a very satisfying way when there was a yell from outdoors.

“Bull!” Dorian shouted.

The Bull jammed his boots on without bothering with the laces, grabbed his axe and ran out into the snow.

Dorian was standing by the apple trees, staring down at an unmoving form.

“I didn’t hit him that hard,” he said, eyes still glued to Cullen’s body. He lay face down in the snow, heavy pack pressing him down into it, and barely managed to shiver. His hood was thrown back, and the Bull could see that his head was swathed in bandages, which were bloody where his ear had been. Either he wasn’t changing them often enough, or he was still bleeding a week later.

“He’s injured- and it might be infected,” the Bull said. “It probably wouldn’t take much to bowl him over.”

“Right,” Dorian said distantly. He dropped to his knees, and pulled the scarf from Cullen’s neck. Cullen moaned incoherently, and tried to throw him off, managing to twist a little. Dorian pushed down between his shoulder blades, and pulled out his knife.

“Severe the brain stem,” he muttered. “Quick and painless.”

He took a deep breath. Then another. And another. The Bull was just about to offer to do it for him when Dorian stabbed the knife in at the back of Cullen’s neck and twisted.

The cannon sounded. Dorian jumped away from the body as though it burned, pressing the back of his hand to his mouth.

“You okay?” the Bull asked.

He obviously wasn’t, but he nodded anyway, for the cameras.

“Are you going to be sick?” the Bull asked.

Dorian shook his head once, and then seemed to think better of it.

“It’s okay if you are,” the Bull said. “Why don’t you go take care of yourself for a moment? I’ll take what we can use from Cullen.”

“The other Careers,” Dorian said. “We don’t know where they are.”

The Bull didn’t think they were lurking nearby. Even if they’d used Cullen as bait, the time to spring an ambush on them had already come.

Still.

“Don’t go too far, then, and keep an eye out,” the Bull said. “I’ve got my axe.”

“Right,” Dorian said. He got up, and staggered over to the closest apple tree. The Bull turned his attention to Cullen, so he could pretend to give Dorian some privacy to vomit in.

Cullen had a lot on him. The pack he wrestled off was heavy- he set it aside for them to go through later. There was some kind of ear flap hat caught in his hood, and the hood itself wasn’t attached to the jacket they’d all gotten in the Launch Room, but a parka that had clearly been in the Cornucopia. It was way too big for him- it hung down practically to his ankles, and was broad enough that the Bull could probably fit into it.

He took those too, and the jacket. And the fleece vest Cullen had on underneath it. He left his shirt, and his pants, but took the gloves, belt, and the shoe laces along with the multitude of knives and the machete he’d been carrying, and then shoved as much of it as he could into the pack. Then he pulled out Dorian’s knife from his neck, cleaned it off on the snow and the hem of Cullen’s shirt, and threw that in too.

There wasn’t a whole lot of room in the pack when he was done. The Bull could feel something solid and metallic inside, and there was plenty else too. He was going to have to carry the jacket and parka.

“We should walk around a bit,” Dorian said suddenly. “The snow is filling in our tracks, but-”

“No, you’re right. We shouldn’t make it too obvious,” the Bull said. He took Cullen’s things into their shelter, picked up his scarf and gloves, and after a moment to think, also picked up his canteen and the shovel.

“Let’s take a walk, then,” he said.

Dorian nodded, and they left Cullen’s body in the snow for the Capitol hovercraft to pick up.

 

* * *

 

 

They came back sometime late in the afternoon, when they were thirsty and had drunk the canteen dry. Cullen was gone; and his things were still in the shelter, waiting to be picked over. Dorian stacked the food they’d gather with the rest of the supplies in the corner. The Bull spread out the clothing he’d taken from Cullen.

“Well,” Dorian said, as he inspected the lining of Cullen’s hat. “This at least makes freezing to death an improbable thing. Well,” he shot a guilty look at the Bull. “For me, at least.”

“Nah, for both of us, I think,” the Bull said, picking up the parka. It was a little hard to get on in the cramped space of their shelter, and if he zipped it all the way up it pulled at his shoulders, but it did fit.

There were a lot of knives. Dorian took the one he’d had already back, and they set the others aside for later with their food. Then they really started digging into the pack.

In the little out pockets of the frame pack they found another compass, a canteen, a mostly intact booklet of matches, two more emergency blankets, some kind of multitool, a small fishing kit, a small sewing kit, and a small battery-powered lantern which Dorian was quick to hang on one of the shelter’s supports.

They also found a package of water purification tablets. Originally a pack of twenty-four, six had already been used.

“The Hirola and the others died a week ago,” the Bull said.

“Yes, that’s correct.”

Cullen must not have collected today’s water yet. Or else he hadn’t gotten it on the first day after Adaar had died.

“Do you think that means that they’ve split up?” Dorian asked.

“Or he split from them.” It wasn’t unusual for the Careers to squirrel away supplies for their own personal use once the alliance had been broken. Cullen could have run from the other Careers after his injury, and then taken this pack from whatever place he’d stashed it. Or maybe they’d all agreed to split, and they all had packs like this one, and were all scattered to the winds; maybe Cullen was just the first one to get the idea of following the compass. “There’s no way to tell what happened from here.”

“I suppose we better move on the main pack, then.”

It’s food, primarily: packs of dried out fruit and vegetables, honey-drizzled oat cakes, and even jerky. The Bull could have cried, he was so happy to see that jerky. It had been two weeks since he’d had meat- normally he’d at least have been able to dig up some clams or catch a fish or something in that time back home.

“I suppose that’ll be dinner tonight,” Dorian said.

“We should try to eat more of the food we gathered, so it doesn’t go bad,” the Bull protested.

“So we’ll eat that too, then,” Dorian said, and wouldn’t hear another word against the plan. The Bull might not have tried very hard to persuade him otherwise.

There was a tarp, a mostly full and somewhat frozen water jug, and a folded-up blanket, so thin that they first took it to be a handkerchief, and even touching it made the Bull feel warmer.

“We can put that loud monstrosity masquerading as a blanket away,” Dorian said enthusiastically, already folding the emergency blanket back up.

There was also a well-stocked first aid kit, and what the Bull originally took to be two pairs of extra socks, but turned out to be an extra pair of socks, and a pair of long tubular woolen things he kind of vaguely remembered some of the Peacekeepers who were actually from the Capitol wearing on their legs when it got really cold.

And then, at the very bottom of the pack was the metallic thing the Bull had felt earlier. It was shaped kind of like a sphere: pressing on the button on the bottom of it cause three stubbly legs to shoot out, transforming it into a tripod. A little hatch on the top pulled out into a handle, and twisting that caused it to open, revealing a metal grate, some kind of collapsible billycan and several small, two-chambered packets that nearly brought tears of joy to Dorian’s eyes.

“Do you know what these are?” he asked, holding one up with a truly bizarre amount of tenderness.

“Edible?” the Bull guessed.

Dorian shook his head. “It’s  _ chemical fire _ , Bull.”

The Bull remained skeptical as Dorian cleared away enough floor space for the stove to stand, piled the rest of the packets far away from it, and broke the seal that divided the two parts of the packets and dropped it in, quickly putting the metal grate over it and setting the still-mostly frozen water jugs nearby. His skepticism left as it quickly grew noticeably warmer in the tent, and the jugs started sweating as they thawed.

“Okay, this is pretty nice,” he admitted. He unzipped his jacket, and put his hands of the stove: it was really warm. “Will this get hot enough to cook with?”

“In about five minutes, for about twenty minutes or so,” Dorian said, already rooting around in his pack. “I thought we might try grilling some of those tubers we found- you did say they tasted better cooked.”

“Yeah, they do,” the Bull said. An idea formed in his head, and he picked up the billycan. “Can you dig out a chicory root for me?”

Making some hot chicory drink was a slight disaster. They roasted the root with the amaranthine artichokes, parsnips, burdock and lily bulbs, and then the Bull tried to mince it small enough to make up for the fact that it wasn’t ground. By the time he’d finished the roots they were going to eat had gone cold, and the fire was only going to be warm enough to boil it for less than five minutes.

Still, it was steaming hot as they passed it between them, and had a rich, bitter flavor that the Bull had missed.

“You know, I think we might have this in Three after all,” Dorian mused. “When exam time runs around, people start selling coffee to kids on the sly, even when they know their parents wouldn’t allow it. I bought a cup before the Final Exams at the end of seventh form-the ones right before apprenticeships begin. It did absolutely nothing to keep me awake, but it tasted a lot like this.”

“It’s used as a coffee substitute more than an actual drink in some places,” the Bull said. “The Peacekeepers sometimes mix them together, try to make their coffee rations last longer.”

They washed the bitterness of the chicory away with the last of the berries they’d collected before it had started to snow. Then they just lay there for a time, digesting, their socks off to let their feet breath for the first time in days.

“How long will the fire go for?” the Bull asked.

“Not long,” Dorian said. “A packet of that size will only last for about three hours or so after being activated before returning to room temperature.”

The Bull hummed, and pointed his toes towards the stove.

That was when the anthem began to play.

“I suppose we should check to make sure we didn’t miss anyone else,” Dorian said, already reaching for his zipper. The Bull grunted in agreement, and rolled over to unzip the entrance enough to see the sky.

It was shockingly cold, but that wasn’t what punched the breath out of him. It was how clearly he could see Cullen’s face where it was projected into the sky, along with the rising of the first moon and every star.

“It’s stopped snowing,” he said.

“What?” Dorian yelped. He wriggled until he was pressed against the Bull staring up past the fringe of elderberry branches into the clear, clear sky. “Oh. Should we do it now, then?”

The Bull shook his head. “It’s still freezing cold. They’re probably bunkered down for the night, and not looking to travel. We’ll set the fire in the morning.”

“Right,” Dorian said. They remained there for a moment, staring into the clear sky, before Dorian shook, and added “Well, it’s still freezing cold, so shut the door, will you?”

“Right,” the Bull echoes. He zipped the entrance back up.

After a moment, he put on his socks, jacket, scarf and boots again.

“I’ve got to take a piss,” he said.

“Right,” Dorian said again. “I’ll… wait here then.”

A few minutes after he returned, Dorian went out for his turn.

“Well, I suppose we should try to get some sleep,” Dorian said once he returned. “Big day tomorrow; fires to light, people to kill, and all that.”

“Yeah, it’s getting late too,” the Bull said, though it wasn't that far past sundown.

Dorian nodded and began to unzip his jacket. Then he stopped, and bit his lip. “Do you still want to share? It’s warm enough now- and we have enough alternatives, now- that we don’t have to.”

“Do you want to sleep alone?” the Bull asked.

“I-” Dorian faltered. “I don’t know.”

The Bull reached out, and grabbed Dorian’s free hand in his own. Dorian crumbled before he could ask again. “No, actually, I don’t,” he admitted.

“Then let’s stick together,” the Bull said. “We’ve got tonight at least.”

“One last night.” Dorian snorted. “It sounds almost romantic, when divorced from context.”

There was nothing the Bull could say to that that wouldn’t make it worse. Instead, they got ready for bed in relative silence.

It was warm enough that they didn’t need to, but the Bull let Dorian zip their jackets together too, and then they shimmied into the sleeping bag.

The Bull closed his eyes and counted breaths, even though he was pretty sure he wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep. Even without the scarves to smooth over or tuck around his shoulders, one of Dorian’s hands moved, and pressed against his chest.

“Bull, I-” Dorian whispered. His voice cracked, so he cleared his throat and tried again. “Whatever happens tomorrow…” He sighed painfully, and pressed his face against the Bull’s chest.

The Bull got it. “Yeah. I’m glad to have met you too.”

Dorian lifted his head from the Bull’s chest, and propped himself up on one arm. His other hand came up and cupped the Bull’s cheek. For one wonderful, terrible, heart-stopping moment, the Bull was certain that Dorian would kiss him.

He didn’t though. Instead he let out a little laugh and let his hand fall away from the Bull’s face. “It feels like it did the first night before the Games.”

“I know I should get so sleep while I can, but I don’t think that’s going to happen,” the Bull agreed.

“That, and I know that tomorrow all of this will disappear, one way or another,” Dorian said. “Do you think it would help if I promised to keep watch?”

“That wouldn’t help you fall asleep,” the Bull pointed out.

“I might have an easier time of it if you were asleep,” Dorian said. “At which point I wouldn’t really be keeping watch, but I can’t think of anything else to do.”

The Bull tugged him down so that he was laying with his head pillowed on the Bull’s chest once more. He wrapped an arm around him, his fingers carding through Dorian’s hair. Even after days on not being washed, it was still the nicest thing he’d touched in a good long while.

“Go to sleep, Dorian,” he said. “I’ll keep watch over you.”

Dorian let out a little huff of a laughed. The Bull could feel his smile through his shirt.

“Goodnight, Bull,” Dorian said.

“Goodnight, Dorian,” the Bull replied.

It took the better part of an hour, but eventually Dorian’s breathing evened out into sleep. The Bull followed shortly after.


	11. Day Fifteen

They didn’t speak for a long time after they woke up the following morning. They simply lay there for a time. The Bull sank his fingers back down into Dorian’s hair. Dorian slid his hand across the Bull’s chest and up to his shoulder, and gave it a squeeze.

When it became obvious that the sun was up, they sat up, disentangled themselves, and ate the last of the fruit. They drank most of the remaining water, and transferred the rest to the canteens. Dorian broke the silence first.

“I suppose we should check to make sure that the trap hasn’t collapsed under the weight of the snow,” he said.

“Yeah. We’ll need to refill the water jugs too.”

Dorian nodded. He had on the vest, and was just putting the jacket back on when he did. He dug out his iodine and matches and dropped them into his pocket, and then jammed the hat into the other one.

Once they were suited up they went outside. The arena was dazzling in the early morning sunshine, almost blinding, though it hadn’t really warmed up. The Bull hacked a hole in the frozen lake and refilled the water jugs. Dorian loitered nearby, one hand on the machete they’d taken from Cullen, and dropped the iodine in once they’d finished.

It would have been more efficient to check on the trap while the Bull was working, but he didn’t begrudge Dorian for wanting to wait.

“I suppose we should take a look, now,” Dorian said.

The Bull nodded. “Let me just stash these in the shelter first.”

They carried the jugs back into the shelter so they wouldn’t freeze, and then went to see the trap. Dread gnawed on the Bull’s stomach as they walked. If the trap had collapse, then that was their best plan gone. They could still lure the Career out with the smoke from the fire, but they didn’t have a ghost of a chance at killing them all. On the other hand, if the trap was functional, then that would be it. They would lure the Careers out here to die, and if one or both of them didn’t go down swinging then at the end of it they would go back to being enemies. The only enemies left in the arena, save for the mutts and that twelve-year-old.

The trap hadn’t collapsed. They only had a rough idea of where it was because they’d left the wood piled up next to it.

“Well,” Dorian said. “I suppose that’s it, then.”

There was still a lot to do. Knock the snow off of the wood they’d collected, for one thing. Dig away some of the snow until they had a good place to light the fire for another. It was basically all dead, dry wood by now, but they’d known that they were going to have to collect more firewood. The Bull selected the smallest of the apple trees, little more than a sapling they’d already stripped of fruit in the lower branches. The Bull felled it, and then they collected the rest of the apples, setting them aside for later. There was more than they could eat in one sitting. He supposed whoever survived the coming fight could collect the rest. Or maybe, if one of the Careers walked away, they would turn their nose up at the food in favor of the Cornucopia supplies. Maybe after they’d staggered off the boy from Twelve would find them, and find the shelter and other supplies they’d left behind too. Maybe he’d spend the rest of the games in the same warm, safe space they’d made over the past few days while the surviving Career got torn apart by muttations.

It was a cheerful thought, at least.

With the Bull’s axe and Dorian’s machete they removed the branches from the main trunk of the tree. Then the Bull started chopping that up.

“I’m going to get the fishing wire from Cullen’s pack,” Dorian announced. “There aren’t any fish to catch with it, so far as I can tell, so we may as well set up a tripwire.”

“Good thinking,” the Bull said.

Dorian took care of that while the Bull continued to chop. Then he went up the hill a ways to dig a snow wall for them to hide behind, so that they could (hopefully) see the Careers coming long before the Careers noticed them.

“Time for the fire, then,” Dorian said mechanically.

The Bull nodded. He set a larger log sitting upright into the center of the little clear patch they’d made, and propped some of the dry wood sticks they’d gathered against it. He tucked some dry tinder in- grass and leaves- and then layered on some green wood over that. He put some of the green wood logs next to the fire so it could dry out, and then Dorian took the matches and lit it up.

They watched the fire catch, and the smoke begin to wind its way up to the sky.

“Were you ever in fights, back home?” the Bull asked Dorian impulsively, as they settled behind the wall.

“Some,” Dorian said, before he admitted. “Loads, actually. No one ever died of that, though. I know how to throw a punch but not much else.”

The Bull nodded. He’d already guessed as much.

“Maybe take the shovel down with you, when they come,” he suggested. “If nothing else, you could use it to beat the Careers back into the pit after you light them on fire.”

Dorian nodded.

They were silent for a time, watching. There was no movement- no mutts, no wapiti, no Careers.

“I’m going to stoke the fire a little,” the Bull said, and went down the hill to do just that. He put another of the green logs in and piled the burning debris around it so it would catch quicker. He put a few dry sticks on as well for good measure, and moved the smaller greenwood pieces out of the way so they wouldn't dry out before the Careers arrived. He ate an apple, and threw the core in for good measure, watching as black smoke curled into the sky. He pocketed a second apple for Dorian and made his way back up to the hill.

Dorian nodded his thanks and began eating, taking slow, methodic bites and chewing many times before he swallowed. Once he’d finished and put the apple core aside, he pulled the hat out of his pocket and stuck it on. It was afternoon, now, and the sun was beginning to sink. The temperature would start dropping soon, and then the light would leave them, and then-

“You know, it occurs to me that if the Career pack has indeed broken up, that we might have to do this again,” Dorian said.

“That’s true,” the Bull said. “It might be better that way. We wouldn’t be outnumbered.”

“I’ve only got the two grenades left,” Dorian said.

“I don’t think the tributes from One will split,” the Bull said.

“What makes you say that?” Dorian asked.

“Just a feeling,” the Bull replied. “I was watching the Careers pretty closely during training. I got the impression that One’s plan was for her to make it.” He could have done that for Adaar, if people hadn’t needed him back home, and wouldn’t still need him once the Victor’s spoils had dried up. If only one of them could win, then making sure as many people as possible were working towards that goal was a pretty good strategy.

Dorian was still mulling that information over. “She’s got a gap between her teeth.”

“Which normally would have counted her out from however they decide who volunteers in One,” the Bull pointed out. “She must have something else.”

Dorian shrugged and grunted.

That was the rest of their day: crouching behind the wall to keep watch, with periodic trips back down to the fire to keep it burning with lots of smoke. They ate from the apples they’d pulled from the tree, only one at a time. Enough to keep their energy up, not enough to slow them down with cramps as they digested. They took turns going to the bathroom. At one point Dorian took their canteens and darted back into their shelter to refill them.

It was sunset before they spotted the Careers struggling towards them from the east, and a pretty bruise-purple and blood-red sunset too. The Bull wondered if the Gamemakers had control over the colors, or if it was just a coincidence that their final confrontation was going to have such a spectacular backdrop.

“It’s time,” Dorian whispered.

The Bull nodded. They made their way back down the hill.

The plan was to pretend not to notice the Careers, and let them sneak up on them. There were a lot of obvious problems with that, the first being that if they had a bow and arrow- they hadn’t, last they’d seen them but that was no guarantee- then the Careers could easily kill one or both of them before ever falling into their trap. If Calpernia threw her spear, then that would be easier to dodge, but still potentially deadly.

“Did you see how many there were?” Dorian asked. “I couldn’t make it out with all the glare.”

“At least two,” the Bull replied. He stuck one the end of one of the larger branches into the fire, leaving most of it out and ready to grab if they needed it. Dorian made sure the shovel was also easy to reach.

The Bull kept his hand on his axe, and Dorian kept his fingers in his pouch and they waited. Minutes felt like hours as the sun painted the snow in brilliant red.

And then, finally, they arrived: Marius and Calpernia, the tributes from District One.

“You’re not running,” Marius observed, once it was obvious that they had all noticed one another.

They were backing up a bit, though. The Careers weren’t close enough to their trap just yet, but they didn’t seem to have any ranged weapons. If they could just goad them into charging for them…

“Don’t block my aim, Bull!” Dorian hissed, and the Bull realized that he was standing right in front of him, like a shield.

“Yeah well,” the Bull said, moving off to the side a little. He was aiming to sound terrified, and didn’t have to reach too far to get it. “It’s been two weeks since the Games started, you know how it is.”

Marius smirked. It looked practiced, and didn’t match the grimness of his eyes. Calpernia’s expression was full of pity.

“Yes,” she said. “It will be good to go home.”

It happened quickly.

The Careers lunged forwards. Calpernia missed the tripwire; Marius did not, and fell face first onto the pit covering as Dorian had intended, taking the ground out from under Calpernia’s feet. Dorian threw his grenade, and it hit its mark. Marius, fully in the trap was engulfed immediately from what the Bull could tell. Calpernia, who was caught on the edge, had only taken the spray of flame on her legs.

The sound of their screaming, the smell of it- the Bull stood there for a moment, paralyzed. Dorian darted forwards and grabbed the shovel as Calpernia managed to pull herself entirely out of the pit, her legs flaming.

He remembered Tama’s hands on his shoulder, holding him back, holding him to her:  _ you can’t help them, Ashkaari, and I can’t lose you too. _

Calpernia swiped at Dorian with her halberd, which had escaped the fire unscathed. Dorian dodged, and brought his foot down on the blade, and the Bull snapped himself out of it.

This wasn’t Seven, and if he ever wanted to be in Seven again, he needed to get this over with. He started forward, intending to help Dorian take care of Calpernia, when he caught some movement from the trees by the lake out of the corner of his eye.

He turned, and there was Samson, running straight for him with his flail raised high. The Bull had just enough time to turn so that he caught it on his side, instead of full on.

It still hurt. It hurt a lot, knocked a scream from his chest and sent blood pouring down his face. He couldn’t see on his left side, now: there was too much blood or swelling, or else he’d lost-

_ Don’t think about it _ , he told himself as he dodged another of Samson’s attacks _. If the eye’s gone, then it’s gone, but you’ve still got to fight. You’ve got to fight for Tama, for Vasaad, for Gatt, for Krem- _

“Bull!” Dorian yelled, and then let out a shriek of pain. The Bull saw Marius’ maul on the ground next to where he’d collapsed, and could pay no more attention to it without getting killed, and letting Dorian be killed after him. A cannon sounded, but he could still hear Dorian breathing and swearing as he struggled with Calpernia. It must have been for Marius.

He and Samson faced off. The Bull kept his back to the fire- hopefully the light would keep Samson dazzled enough to make a mistake. If he could just get him to overswing and leave an opening-

He did just that, quickly enough that the Bull almost missed his chance. Almost. He lunged forward, and sank his axe into Samson’s neck.

The good part of that: he couldn’t scream. The bad part of that: his heart was still pumping as he collapsed on the ground, and it continued to pump as the Bull knelt on his chest and pulled his axe free, spraying blood everywhere.

Another cannon sounded. A wave of lightheaded exhaustion washed over the Bull, and he had to force himself to check on Dorian’s battle.

Calpernia’s legs had gone out, leaving behind blackened meat into which pieces of fabric from her pants were fused. Her halberd had snapped, and Dorian had ignored the shovel and the maul and picked up half with the axe head on it. She still had the blunt end, and was striking out with it determinedly.

She had to know she was dead. That wasn’t the sort of injury even the Capitol could easily fix. But that didn’t mean she wouldn’t try to take down Dorian too. Judging from the way he was favoring his left, she’d already managed to inflict some damage.

Dorian managed to dart what would be her last attack, and sink his half of the halberd into her neck. It cut her jugular, and her blood cut a groove into the snow, and another cannon sounded as Dorian feel to his knees, looking like he was going to puke.

He didn’t though. He just made a couple of pained gagging noises and then pulled himself together.

That was good. He was pretty, and clever, and if he stopped puking after he killed the sponsors would like him even more. He could make it, still.

The Bull, meanwhile…

“Bull?” Dorian asked quietly.

He was weaving slightly from where he was sitting on Samson’s corpse. There was a lot of blood on him, and not enough of it was Samson’s to do him much good.

“Hey,” the Bull said. “We did it.”

And then he tipped sideways into the snow, and had no choice but to let himself sink down into it.


	12. Day Sixteen

The Bull was warm when he woke up.

That was surprising, once he’d pushed past the pain enough to remember why there was so much of it. It wasn’t like he’d expected Dorian to kill him or abandon him in the snow to die, but he hadn’t expected he’d wake up again.

He was back in the shelter. He was pretty sure he had the parka on- the fur lining was tickling the back of his neck- and an emergency blanket crackled as he moved. He tried lifting his arm to check his face, but found that he couldn’t until Dorian jolted awake and stopped clinging to it.

“Bull? Are you awake?”

“Yep.”

“Hang on a moment, let me-” Dorian pulled away and fumbled until the lantern turned on.

The Bull winced at the brightness of the light and then winced again as the motion pulled at the bandages he could feel wrapped around his head, and the stitches he could feel inexpertly sewn into his cheek.

“You’ve missed the anthem, and the death recap,” Dorian told him. “And the dragon. It came back- probably an hour ago, now? Something like that. It’s nearly morning.”

The Bull nodded and immediately thought better of it.

“I- I didn’t know how to give you any pain medication while you were out of it,” Dorian said. “Do you think you could swallow some now, with some water?”

“Sure,” the Bull croaked.

Dorian rooted around in one of the packs. The Bull took a look around. The place was a mess: everything was pulled up and askance of where it should have been. The sleeping bag was pulled up on its side and turned around so the head of it was facing the stove. The Bull’s jacket and scarf had been laid out over one of the packs and the water jugs. He couldn’t make sense of any of it.

“Here,” Dorian said, handing him his canteen and two small, bright-green pills. “It should take the edge off.”

It did, actually, kind of. After about fifteen minutes the pain went from an unbearable stabbing to an unbearable throbbing, at least. At Dorian’s urging, he continued to sip from his canteen.

“You’ve lost a lot of blood,” Dorian said. “You weren’t exactly coherent, after the fight had ended and you collapsed. I managed to persuade you to stumble as far as the edge of the elderberry grove, and then you fell unconscious, I think. I had to drag you the rest of the way in, and you took an awful lot of snow in with you.”

“Sorry,” the Bull muttered.

“I managed to shovel most of it back out again,” Dorian said. “The rest made a puddle which got soaked up into the sleeping bag, but it turned out that Cullen had bled all over the inside of his first aid kit anyway, so. I had to boil some water to sterilize the gauze, and then I had a heat source to dry things out.”

“And my things?” the Bull asked, extending his pinky towards the jacket and scarf.

“I tried my best to get the blood out before the water got too cold. I’m not sure how well I succeeded, though,” Dorian said. “It is hot water that you’re supposed to wash bloodstains in, right?”

“No,” the Bull said. “I’m pretty sure that’s cold.”

“Oh,” Dorian said. “Well. At least the heat will have killed most of the pathogens. And very little of it actually set into the jacket- most of it rinsed right off the water proofing. I think the scarf should be safe to use, so long as you don’t try to breathe through it, or press it to an open wound.”

“Yeah,” the Bull agreed. “Okay. How- how bad is it?”

“Pretty bad,” Dorian admitted. “I cleaned and stitched the wound as best I could, but I’m not a doctor or anything, so I don’t know how well I did. And- Bull, I’m so sorry, but you lost your eye.”

He’d known that, but the confirmation was still- well, it was something.

“Did you check down my shirt?” the Bull asked.

“I- what?”

“You wouldn’t believe the crap that gets lost down my shirt,” the Bull said. “That’s why I normally go without.”

Dorian stared at him for a moment before breaking into a laughing fit that quickly turned into a coughing jag.

A very long coughing jag.

“You absolute bastard,” Dorian swore breathlessly, once he’d gotten himself under control. “Don’t make me laugh.”

“You okay?” the Bull asked.

“Well I’m not missing an eye!” Dorian retorted. “I think one of my ribs broke when Calpernia threw that maul at me. Or perhaps multiple ribs. I didn't even notice until I'd dragged you in here, and the brand of medicine I was studying is really no help at all here.”

The Bull had nothing to say to that. Dorian didn’t add anything else for a while, just refilled the Bull’s canteen when he’d finished it.

But they had to talk about it. They _had_ to.

“We killed the Careers,” the Bull said.

“Yes,” Dorian said. “We did.”

“That was the plan,” the Bull said.

“It was indeed.”

“No, I mean,” the Bull pressed. “We agreed that we would have an alliance until the Careers were dead. And they’re dead.”

“Simply because we’re no longer allies doesn’t mean I want you to-” Dorian was trying to snap, but he couldn’t even finish his sentence.

He crumpled. The Bull wondered if they were at the point where touching might be interpreted as an attack yet.

“It’s like this,” Dorian said, before the Bull could come to a conclusion. “I didn’t get to say goodbye, to Gereon and Felix. The Peacekeepers said that they couldn’t come, because I’d volunteered for Felix and they didn’t want me to get hurt by them because I’d ‘stolen Felix’s honor’ or something along those lines. I don’t know, they were probably just messing with us. The Peacekeepers in Three are always a terror, people say it’s because Three is where the Rebellion that lead to the Dark Days began. It’s part of our punishment, and some people get very idolatrous about it being our penance. It’s- my _parents_ could come see me, but _they_ couldn’t. I’m not- I’m not okay with that, Bull. I wanted to have that much, at least, and- and it won’t matter, if I win. I can go back, there’s no law that says I have to bring my parents with me to the Victor’s Village, I can- winning would change things. I could buy Felix better medicine. I could buy Felix a better _liver_. We’d never have to go the Capitol for funds again, it-”

“I know what you mean,” the Bull said. “Tama lost most of her savings- most of the community home’s resources- in the fire. I could replace that. I could do more than replace it. I might not be able to bring everyone to the Victor’s Village with me, but I could send supplies to them. I could send saplings to be planted for fruit, I could send a coop for chickens, Dalish and Stitches could go to the college in Seven, it- it would help. It would help a lot, if I won.”

“I really don’t want to kill you, Bull,” Dorian said. “But I really, really want to live.”

“Yeah,” the Bull said. “Same here. And I don’t know how to deal with that.”

“I have an idea, actually,” Dorian said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. You pick a direction, and start running. I’ll go in the opposite direction.” He lifted his head a little, and met the Bull’s eyes with a little smile. “And then I guess we wait and see which of us the Capitol favors more.”

 

* * *

 

They divided the supplies up as evenly as they could. Most of Cullen’s gear would only fit Dorian, so he got the bulk of that, and the Bull got the parka, the parachutes, and Dorian’s sponsor-given scarf in return. He got the shelter and the blankets; Dorian got the tarps, sleeping bag, and shovel. Dorian insisted on taking the water purification tablets, since the iodine could also be used to disinfect the Bull’s wounds, and by that logic he also got most of the first aid kit. Dorian also insisted that the Bull take the jerky since he’d wanted meat so badly. The Bull made him take the protein block in exchange. Dorian got the stove and chemical fire packs, and the Bull got the matches, since he knew how to build a fire and Dorian didn’t, and from there everything else was pretty easy to divide and pack away into Dorian’s framepack and the two backpacks that were now the Bull’s.

They took one last lap around the lake, gathering as much as they could, and then didn’t have anything else to put it off any longer with.

“Have you picked a direction yet?” Dorian asked.

“I thought I might keep going south-southwest,” the Bull said. That meant that Dorian would go back the way they’d come, where he knew the landmarks and where to find food and shelter. The Bull would be better able to recognize edibles they hadn’t come across yet, so it wasn’t too much of an advantage.

“Then I suppose this is it,” Dorian said. “Goodbye. Good luck.”

“Good luck to you too,” the Bull said. “Good luck to all of us.”

“Good luck to Twelve,” Dorian said, with a strained laugh. “They haven’t had a Victor since- what, the Quarter Quell?”

“Longer than we’ve been alive,” the Bull said.

Dorian nodded. “I- I suppose we should go, then.”

“Yeah.”

One of them was going to have turn away and start walking first. It might as well be the Bull.

He got three steps before he heard Dorian’s call. “Bull?”

“Yeah?”

He turned around, just in time for Dorian to collide with him.

Objectively speaking, it wasn’t a very good kiss. The Bull’s face still hurt where Dorian’s hand brushed over it on its way to his horns, all their gear made it really clumsy and they were so desperate that they didn’t want to let go for long enough to change angles or anything.

But they had to let go. Dorian took the step back this time.

“You know something?” he asked. “I’m not sure I’ve kissed someone I actually liked before.”

The Bull felt a bit like he’d been punched in the gut. “You’re not making this any easier, Dorian.”

“I know. I’m sorry,” Dorian said. Then he took a deep breath, and rallied. “Well. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I hope I never see you again.”

“Yeah,” the Bull replied. “Me neither.”

No going back this time. Dorian headed off, and the Bull went in the opposite direction.

It wasn’t long before snow started to fall again.


End file.
